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Comment by mikestew | Hacker News Reader

My perspective on it was just a way to get free calls from pay phones; is there more to it than that?

This was before broadband, and access to external systems was done through a device that connected to...a phone. Your local calling area would be maybe a 30 mile radius or so (it varied a lot depending on local carrier). Wanna see what's on that mainframe at the university 100 miles away? Well, be quick because it's going to be pricey. Or...

How pricey? Someone else already looked it up, but I recall MCI advertising long distance calls for $0.10/minute. That's $6/hour. Minimum wage was something like $3/hour. So if you're a kid working at McDonald's, you needed to work two hours for every hour of access. Or...

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Also time. I think cross country calls in the mid 80s were more like $0.50/min, and the first 1-3 minutes were billed at a higher rate.

Yup, that's why MCI was a big deal. I can't find a reference, but I recall long distance call rates varying by distance under the Bell System. MCI said "ten cents per minute no matter where you're calling to" (can't find a reference for that, either).

But I think the selling point for alternative LD carriers (MCI, Sprint, and the "10-10-..." numbers) was that you could set a timer and know at the end of the call how much it cost. Under AT&T? Get the calculator and paper out.

I worked for MCI in the '80s. People changed over for the savings - it was always cheaper than AT&T. In fact, a lot of AT&T's marketing played to the "loyalty" fear: if you leave us, you're suspect for being un-American. Not in so many words, of course, but that was the tuning fork it resonated with. (Worked great on older folks who lived through McCarthyism.)

Also, don't forget the difference between inter-LATA and intra-LATA calls. The latter was a call within your local provider's area, the former went to another. Sometimes the line between exchanges was literally across the road. Inter-LATA calls were generally more expensive than getting through on a long-distance trunk, so there was this ridiculous feature of phone bills in those days that calling grandma in the next town over was more expensive than calling your college girlfriend three states away.

I also used to work for a "connected car" manufacturer. The per-minute rates they get today for using the onboard phone are outrageous even by '80s standards. I won't mention the data rates they charge for using the "connected car." Let's just say it would be far cheaper to buy an iPhone and Verizon's 20GB plan if you're going to use it a lot.

Just for context, that's about $1.50/min in 2016 dollars

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