On 05/20/2017 11:12 AM, Warner Losh via cctalk wrote: > In the bay area in california, and likely elsewhere too, there was a local > calling zone that was set based on the population patterns of the 1950's > and 1960's. This meant that calls to some numbers were free, while others > had a toll associated with them. There were zones around the central zone. > So it would cost money to call out of your zone, even if things were only a > few miles away. It was a total crock, but something that the PUCs allowed > because it has always been allowed before the suburbs grew up into one > contiguous population area. So fast forward to the 1980's or 1990's and you > found it impossible to know how much a call would cost. In Colorado, I > lived in an area just outside the metro calling area. I could call 20 miles > away to the far side of Longmont for free. But calling 2 miles to the pizza > joint was a long distance call because it was over the line in gunbarrel > which was in the metro calling area. Totally insane and bat **** crazy.
Yes--and in addition, if you were willing to pay a monthly subscription fee, you could add a city in the calling area that exempted you from metered service for that city. I remember doing this for Menlo Park. Not only that, but sometimes the tariffs were set up such that A's calls to B were free, but B's calls to A were toll. And things were even weirder when the destination was a non-AT&T carrier. GTE, for example, serviced Boulder Creek and Los Gatos. In the early days of BBS, one of the ways for a sysop to save money was to specify that a line was "answer only"--you couldn't dial out from it. I know of at least one case where Pacific Bell insisted that a modem on such a line constituted a "data line", for which there was a much higher charge. It was a wacky world. Even by 1990s, a lot of the RBOCs hadn't completely shed their habits. I learned from an installer that a service call to "check the line" was free, but one to "check equalization" was a substantial charge, even though the former usually included the latter. --Chuck --Chuck
