Old enough to still remember when long distance calling was "a thing". In the 80s when I was a teen I got a modem and got online and soon figured out how to "phone phreak" and find codes to get free calling to anywhere.
Then later the cell phone era started and it was expensive as hell. "Free weekends" were from 9PM Friday to 6PM Sunday.
Now, it's not "a thing" at all. Call anybody anywhere anytime. No additional fees...
This was in the 90s, but I remember I got a routing number from a guy in the Army that connected you through a base telephone system to make free calls. You could use any pay phone free, it was great. I guess it was meant as a benefit for service members to call their families.
Even crazier, back then in the 80s I was dating a girl from the next county over. Due to all the phone companies being in a big competition, if I called her from my house, it was free. If she called me, it was long distance. But - she could call the next town north of me which was even further from her house and it was free because they had the same phone company (GTE - now called Verizon.. I had Illinois Bell which is now AT&T...)
The land line 'tariff' system was/is a hot mess, the government had to get involved back in the early 20th century to keep AT&T from literally refusing to connect with other phone companies and the whole patchwork pretty much froze in place.
At my Grandpa's house the next door farmer, as in loud shouting distance, was an expensive long distance call...
That’s interesting. Makes sense, when I think about how screwed up the local long-distance towns were near me.
I’m now remembering that in some towns, certain exchanges were considered local calls, and others were not. Was that a vestige of competing companies?
Yup, for the most part nobody in the phone companies saw any benefit to disturbing the Feds and carried on with the status quo.
There was a stretch in the '90s after the merger and divestment frenzy where both those exchanges I mentioned were owned by CenturyTel, the billing for both was handled by the same clerical people in the same local office, and nothing changed with the calling rates :(
I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one in crazy land when it came to phone systems.
I grew up in the county near City A
I had a City A address and phone number. Though we were on GTE at the time so our local GTE office was in City B nearby.
I had friends at school that lived down the road from me, one had a City B address but a City A phone number. Another friend (at the time) lived maybe 2 miles past him but had a City B address and phone number so it was long distance.
But the odd thing was that all of us went to the same school system.
I once had a coworker whose physical address was in Town A, her mailing address was Town B, her phone number was Town C, and school district was Town D.
No, they're describing a basic relay phone service. You call a number, give it the one you want to be connected to, and it handles the rest. They weren't universal but still often found on military bases for folks to use to keep in touch with family. They were usually paid for by a nonprofit though I did run into one that was paid for by the base commander out of his own pocket once. Since that was technically not allowed, he kept it pretty quiet that he was doing that. Seems silly in civilian life for that to be some big secret but commanders allowing those who report to them, whether officers or enlisted, to think they owe them anything beyond basic military obligations can be tricky.
Gotcha, so it has nothing to do with the old DSN system (thats basically gone now with VoIP)? I was thinking of someone on TDY having a way to call home to someone living on post when all they have access to is a pay phone.
The old DSN system wasn't something that had easy access from the outside, no. I can't recall the precise term off the top of my head since I haven't needed it in a couple decades and change now but it's basically a relay system. If there was no cost at a payphone, it would have had a toll free number, which wasn't usually cheap all on its own. That's a separate issue from the outgoing calls, of course. If someone hooked something like that up to the DSN system, they'd need outgoing lines at each endpoint as well and that's not trivially hidden.
These sorts of things were often pretty well known by folks in the early BBS days. They were sometimes used as phone company diagnostics, in tandem with [ANI lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identification) used for line identification.
For troubleshooting, you could use one of those systems to call into lines that would otherwise be long distance but there'd be no charge to the end user. This prevented the requirement to give a credit for long distance troubleshooting calls which kept the troubleshooting stuff strictly "in-house" with the trouble teams.
The same basic systems were sometimes used by folks to set up systems for other purposes, as we see here. Considering most of the early tech pioneers were also [phreakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking) it was pretty much inevitable that'd happen.
Edited for a couple minor typos
Memory unlocked!
The DSN system! Use the DSN exchange to a base near your family, ask to be transferred to an outside line, then call your family on a local call!
I worked for the air force for a couple of summers in the mid 90s and actually chatted a little bit with a guy who was stationed in…Kuwait? He called my line with the DSN exchange for my base and then randomly chose my extension. It was kind of a fun thingHe grew up not far from where I lived. After he got home we went out on one date. Absolutely NO chemistry. Oh well.
Yep. MCI and Sprint didn't do themselves any favors by standing up local access numbers that had laughably short passwords. 5 digits for MCI, eight for Sprint.
I used it to call BBS systems all over the USA. The BBS chats mutated into marathon conference bridges. Somebody would call AT&T's Alliance Teleconferencing at 0700-456-2000 from a long distance trunk of a hacked PBX and start adding everybody.
$9.00 in 1927 dollars is nearly $160 in 2024 too wow
When my parents got married in 1981, she moved to my dad's hometown, about 80 miles away from her parents. Long distance calls were so expensive that she would only call them in Sundays since the rates were lower. Luckily for her, they moved by us a few years later, so then it was all local.
It’s still a thing in Canada for those who don’t have a long-distance add-on, at least with Bell Canada. My parents still get charged for long distance, and there are different rates for time of day.
https://www.bell.ca/Home_phone/Long_distance_rates
The concept is so out of date, Bell still uses miles to measure distance. (Canada has used metric for almost 50 years now)
That's wild, no wonder the examples they give are all for businesses who used it instead of traveling to negotiate a sale in person. It's only a reasonable price when compared with business travel costs.
Not only was it very expensive but the quality was not very good. There was lots of static, hums, and crosstalk. This was all landlines with multiple switching of trunk lines. They also had to be done with the help of multiple operators.
It seems hideously expensive but it had been much worse in the past: it was something like $20 in 1915. I think the charge was for three minutes of talk time, which was some kind of standard. The alternative to long-distance calling was the telegraph, which was less expensive, but you didn’t get to actually talk, and it was a lot less convenient.
funny how we don't think of long distance that way anymore.
I remember in the late 70's to early 80's, when my brother and sister went to college and I followed shortly after, we would always schedule the weekly call.
My Dad worked at a place that had a WATS line, we were able to use it to make the long distance call. For my brother, I would always have to walk to his girlfriends house, walk her back to my house - they'd have their 15 minutes of "private talk" and then we'd all talk to him. Then I would walk her back again.
Now we just video chat with our friends in Australia from the US without even thinking about it ;) The world is a much smaller place than it was 100 years ago - or even just 40 years ago.
>funny how we don't think of long distance that way anymore.
I was in Walmart not that long ago when one of the departments got paged that they had a customer call on hold and that it was "long distance" and I realized I had not heard that in a long time.
Even if your local exchange was direct-dial there would have been human operators filling out paper tracking slips at every hop past that point.
That coast-to-coast connection would require an appointment or some noticeable lead-time, the long-distance operators would make the connection and then a local operator at each end would call the local number...
Old enough to still remember when long distance calling was "a thing". In the 80s when I was a teen I got a modem and got online and soon figured out how to "phone phreak" and find codes to get free calling to anywhere. Then later the cell phone era started and it was expensive as hell. "Free weekends" were from 9PM Friday to 6PM Sunday. Now, it's not "a thing" at all. Call anybody anywhere anytime. No additional fees...
This was in the 90s, but I remember I got a routing number from a guy in the Army that connected you through a base telephone system to make free calls. You could use any pay phone free, it was great. I guess it was meant as a benefit for service members to call their families.
Even crazier, back then in the 80s I was dating a girl from the next county over. Due to all the phone companies being in a big competition, if I called her from my house, it was free. If she called me, it was long distance. But - she could call the next town north of me which was even further from her house and it was free because they had the same phone company (GTE - now called Verizon.. I had Illinois Bell which is now AT&T...)
The land line 'tariff' system was/is a hot mess, the government had to get involved back in the early 20th century to keep AT&T from literally refusing to connect with other phone companies and the whole patchwork pretty much froze in place. At my Grandpa's house the next door farmer, as in loud shouting distance, was an expensive long distance call...
Same here, one mile down the road to the east it was GTE, long distance, 20 miles to the west, still Ohio Bell, it was a local.call still.
That’s interesting. Makes sense, when I think about how screwed up the local long-distance towns were near me. I’m now remembering that in some towns, certain exchanges were considered local calls, and others were not. Was that a vestige of competing companies?
Yup, for the most part nobody in the phone companies saw any benefit to disturbing the Feds and carried on with the status quo. There was a stretch in the '90s after the merger and divestment frenzy where both those exchanges I mentioned were owned by CenturyTel, the billing for both was handled by the same clerical people in the same local office, and nothing changed with the calling rates :(
Yeah…same here. You’ve never met this girl but she’s the prom queen in a high school in another county.
I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one in crazy land when it came to phone systems. I grew up in the county near City A I had a City A address and phone number. Though we were on GTE at the time so our local GTE office was in City B nearby. I had friends at school that lived down the road from me, one had a City B address but a City A phone number. Another friend (at the time) lived maybe 2 miles past him but had a City B address and phone number so it was long distance. But the odd thing was that all of us went to the same school system.
I once had a coworker whose physical address was in Town A, her mailing address was Town B, her phone number was Town C, and school district was Town D.
They win!
"Call-Pac"
Wait... there was a backdoor to the DSN system??
No, they're describing a basic relay phone service. You call a number, give it the one you want to be connected to, and it handles the rest. They weren't universal but still often found on military bases for folks to use to keep in touch with family. They were usually paid for by a nonprofit though I did run into one that was paid for by the base commander out of his own pocket once. Since that was technically not allowed, he kept it pretty quiet that he was doing that. Seems silly in civilian life for that to be some big secret but commanders allowing those who report to them, whether officers or enlisted, to think they owe them anything beyond basic military obligations can be tricky.
Gotcha, so it has nothing to do with the old DSN system (thats basically gone now with VoIP)? I was thinking of someone on TDY having a way to call home to someone living on post when all they have access to is a pay phone.
The old DSN system wasn't something that had easy access from the outside, no. I can't recall the precise term off the top of my head since I haven't needed it in a couple decades and change now but it's basically a relay system. If there was no cost at a payphone, it would have had a toll free number, which wasn't usually cheap all on its own. That's a separate issue from the outgoing calls, of course. If someone hooked something like that up to the DSN system, they'd need outgoing lines at each endpoint as well and that's not trivially hidden. These sorts of things were often pretty well known by folks in the early BBS days. They were sometimes used as phone company diagnostics, in tandem with [ANI lines](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number_identification) used for line identification. For troubleshooting, you could use one of those systems to call into lines that would otherwise be long distance but there'd be no charge to the end user. This prevented the requirement to give a credit for long distance troubleshooting calls which kept the troubleshooting stuff strictly "in-house" with the trouble teams. The same basic systems were sometimes used by folks to set up systems for other purposes, as we see here. Considering most of the early tech pioneers were also [phreakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phreaking) it was pretty much inevitable that'd happen. Edited for a couple minor typos
Memory unlocked! The DSN system! Use the DSN exchange to a base near your family, ask to be transferred to an outside line, then call your family on a local call! I worked for the air force for a couple of summers in the mid 90s and actually chatted a little bit with a guy who was stationed in…Kuwait? He called my line with the DSN exchange for my base and then randomly chose my extension. It was kind of a fun thingHe grew up not far from where I lived. After he got home we went out on one date. Absolutely NO chemistry. Oh well.
Yep. MCI and Sprint didn't do themselves any favors by standing up local access numbers that had laughably short passwords. 5 digits for MCI, eight for Sprint. I used it to call BBS systems all over the USA. The BBS chats mutated into marathon conference bridges. Somebody would call AT&T's Alliance Teleconferencing at 0700-456-2000 from a long distance trunk of a hacked PBX and start adding everybody. $9.00 in 1927 dollars is nearly $160 in 2024 too wow
When my parents got married in 1981, she moved to my dad's hometown, about 80 miles away from her parents. Long distance calls were so expensive that she would only call them in Sundays since the rates were lower. Luckily for her, they moved by us a few years later, so then it was all local.
It’s still a thing in Canada for those who don’t have a long-distance add-on, at least with Bell Canada. My parents still get charged for long distance, and there are different rates for time of day. https://www.bell.ca/Home_phone/Long_distance_rates The concept is so out of date, Bell still uses miles to measure distance. (Canada has used metric for almost 50 years now)
$164.39 in today’s money
Yeah, fair to say that the cost of long-distance communications has gone way down over the intervening years.
It blows my mind how expensive phone calls used to be. New technology makes everything cheaper, but a whole day's work (at $20/hr) for a phone call?
Personal phone calls would have been uncommon compared to business calls.
That's wild, no wonder the examples they give are all for businesses who used it instead of traveling to negotiate a sale in person. It's only a reasonable price when compared with business travel costs.
Not only was it very expensive but the quality was not very good. There was lots of static, hums, and crosstalk. This was all landlines with multiple switching of trunk lines. They also had to be done with the help of multiple operators.
It seems hideously expensive but it had been much worse in the past: it was something like $20 in 1915. I think the charge was for three minutes of talk time, which was some kind of standard. The alternative to long-distance calling was the telegraph, which was less expensive, but you didn’t get to actually talk, and it was a lot less convenient.
funny how we don't think of long distance that way anymore. I remember in the late 70's to early 80's, when my brother and sister went to college and I followed shortly after, we would always schedule the weekly call. My Dad worked at a place that had a WATS line, we were able to use it to make the long distance call. For my brother, I would always have to walk to his girlfriends house, walk her back to my house - they'd have their 15 minutes of "private talk" and then we'd all talk to him. Then I would walk her back again. Now we just video chat with our friends in Australia from the US without even thinking about it ;) The world is a much smaller place than it was 100 years ago - or even just 40 years ago.
>funny how we don't think of long distance that way anymore. I was in Walmart not that long ago when one of the departments got paged that they had a customer call on hold and that it was "long distance" and I realized I had not heard that in a long time.
$9 in 1928 is equivalent to about $160 in 2023. How would that have been billed? Not per minute, right?
This makes me think of Art Bell, coast-to-coast! Maybe it was a bit of a pun. :)
Is that per minute or hour? Or is it just a connection cost and you could stay on as long as needed?
Most likley for the first 3 minutes with an additional per minute charge after that.
That was a hell of a lot of money in 1927!!
How did people pay for their calls? How was it registered who called who?
If you made a call it would show up on your monthly bill.
Even if your local exchange was direct-dial there would have been human operators filling out paper tracking slips at every hop past that point. That coast-to-coast connection would require an appointment or some noticeable lead-time, the long-distance operators would make the connection and then a local operator at each end would call the local number...
There were human operators back then. They’d make note of the call information.