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Comment by bartread | Hacker News Reader

> because the long distance phone bill was $926 and my dad was furious

Blimey. I'm not surprised. In today's money that's $2,239.52. You were like a very early forerunner of those kids running up massive credit card bills on in-app purchases.

Great story though: thanks for sharing.

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Long distance calling used to be a pretty big deal. Even intrastate calls outside of your local calling area could be expensive--in fact, sometimes more than interstate. For BBSs, there was various software available that basically let you logon, do your uploads and downloads of messages, hang up and do your reading and writing offline.

Go back a few years further and people would do all kinds of tricks if, for example, they just wanted to signal someone that they'd arrived somewhere safely. They'd make an operator-assisted person-to-person and the receiving caller would just say that person wasn't there and there would be no charge.

Call forwarding was one way to bypass intrastate long distant charges. My bestie ran a co-op. Members would get dedicated POTS line, add call forwarding feature, run a dedicated relay node. He maintained both dialer (client) and router (server) software. You enter phone number, dialer would pick a toll-free node in that general direction (telco provisioned prefixes corresponded to physical exchanges). Node would answer, decide to forward you to target number or next node. repeat as needed. The co-op spanned much of western Washington, from Bellingham to Olympia.

Phreaking as a Service

PhaaS

We can call the setup a PhaaSer. You're welcome world.

Bob Wehadababyitsaboy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JxhTnWrKYs

I immediately thought of this. Thanks for the link!

Having never been in the United States in the 80s or 90s, can some explain some background here?

It sounds very interesting but I cannot bring the pieces together.

You can (or could?) place collect calls in the US. The receiver of such a call then pays the bill. To prevent abuse, you give your name and then the phone operator will ask the receiver "do you want to accept, and pay for, this collect call from Bob Smith?"

The video is just making fun of that situation by encoding a message in the name.

Students also frequently had shared phone services of various types so they'd make a person to person call to their parents with some agreed-upon name and their parents would call back at the shared number. When I went to school we also traded cassettes because phone calls of any length were expensive in any case.

(The context is that long distance phone calls cost maybe $4+ per minute in today's dollars.)

I ran up a $400 bill one month in the early 90’s when I was in high school using a BBS in San Diego from my parents’ house in Escondido (roughly 30 miles away). Despite being in the same area code at the time, the rates were obscene and I believe higher than it would have been interstate.

My city used to be divided up like a pie. Calling from one pie slice to another would incur a fee. Near the center of the city the slices came together so calling someone across the street could incur a fee.

For BBSs, there was various software available that basically let you logon, do your uploads and downloads of messages, hang up and do your reading and writing offline.

I used to run a node of one of the first public BBS networks (1983ish). Messages went from one node to the other using store-and-forward overnight. With enough nodes in the right LATAs, you could send messages (e-mail at first, then bulletin board messages) across the entire region.

Where I lived at the time, I could make a local call between two area codes in two different states, so my node was very busy overnight relaying all the messages that got bottled up in either state at 300 baud.

And a few years before that to 1840, people used to perform similar tricks with mail. Prior to the introduction of postage stamps mail was paid on delivery¹, so you could send messages to friends or flood enemies with someone else picking up the cost. There is no new thing under the sun.

[/me holds breath for someone to point out an earlier version.]

¹ https://rmspecialstamps.com/about/history-of-stamps/

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