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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

Even free/subscription BBSs often involved pretty expensive per-minute phone charges. Intrastate in the US could actually cost more than interstate. Phone calls were expensive historically. Maybe more than $1/minute except for very local in today's currency.

Compuserve also had different rates depending on the baud rate you connected at.

Having a computer and getting online was a pretty expensive hobby in the 80s and early 90s.

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There were several bugs with MajorBBS and certain door games that allowed people to trade in game credits for BBS time. Trade Wars 2002 had several bugs along the way. One you could script buying and selling a certain ship over and over, which would give you infinite in game credits. Just transfer it over for free BBS time.

Another one set your MajorBBS account to negative credits and had no lower bound. So once you used a door game bug to trigger that, you basically lived like a king because it worked as currency since you could trade credits to other users.

It was mostly to just have free BBS time since I couldnt afford it.

intracity was usually free though in the us

It really depended on the era and what area you were in. After the breakup of the Bell System, flat-rate areas (Zone 1 calling) spread across the RBOCs, but ultimately that still meant that metropolitan areas tended to benefit more than rural areas. The SF Bay Area was a prime example of this where the East Bay arguably had one of the best LATAs around that could reach dozens of bulletin boards.

Hopefully more Fidonet archives turn up in the coming years so people can understand what things were like back then. Ditto Compuserve... which, if I understand correctly, a large collection of documents relating thereto was acquired by the Internet Archive and awaits processing.

even in albuquerque i could reach dozens of bbses though

It was not in the period I'm talking about. Your local calling area--maybe some adjacent exchanges/towns--was free but for me to call Boston from about an hour west was decidedly not free in the late 80s. Mileage may have varied of course.

And when cellular came in, I deliberately picked an area code based on the people I was most likely to call.

Yep, exactly. I think he boundaries weren't fuzzy, as in it wasn't "the towns adjacent to you" but there were lines. I'm pretty sure it cost money to call my friends who lived one town over for instance, but I know it was the case for friends who lived 2-3 towns over.

right, late 80s. where i lived at the time (albuquerque or socorro) the local calling area was a whole city or group of nearby towns, but if you were to drive in any direction for an hour you'd be out in the middle of the wilderness, so it doesn't sound like your situation was actually different

At the time I was in a reasonably far out suburb and there really weren’t local BBSs of note. Certainly not wilderness but close to an hour out of Boston. May have been a couple of local BBSs but they’d have been one or two line operations.

yeah, almost all were one- or two-line operations in albuquerque

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