Subj : Re: Most memorable modern BBS experi
To : phigan
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Fri May 02 2025 07:30 am
-=> phigan wrote to Snobsoft <=-
ph> It depends on where you live (the U, S, and A is pretty big). In some
ph> places, the local calling area was the entire city or more (state?
ph> maybe). But in other places, that local area was only a little chunk of
ph> a city, and it would be a long distance call to only a few miles away.
It was worse than you describe. You'd have a local calling area, which
was usually free calls limited to a couple of miles. You'd have a "local
toll" area that was expensive to call and covered a much larger area,
then long distance. LD ended up, because of competition, being cheaper
than the local toll calls since they had a monopoly. Those local toll
calls were where you hear about kids running up their parent's phone
bill. I did that, calling a BBS one town over, but the next town past
that, which was actually closer to me in some parts, was local toll.
$170 was a lot of money back then!
I had a project at work that had 2 firstclass servers calling each other
every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, every day because the person who set
it up didn't understand store and forward mail systems. The systems were
local toll calls and hideously expensive. I tried explaining the notion
of crash messaging to the project manager, but he insisted - after all,
it wasn't his budget.
I got creative. I called the phone company and set up call forward busy
service on one of the lines. Configured the call forward busy number to
be the other system. Then, we told the first system to call *itself*, it
got a busy signal, and call forwarded the call to the other end, at a
*much* cheaper rate.
The project manager didn't care, but I called it a win for the company.
You could try routing a local toll call through an LD provider when you
ran a phone system, and if the local Bell company heard about it, would
cause a major stink.
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