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My dad was an amateur radio operator. That's exactly what he did. If you can imagine, back in the 70's and 80's normal people didn't have access to the intern

My dad was an amateur radio operator. That's exactly what he did. If you can imagine, back in the 70's and 80's normal people didn't have access to the internet. So all of the discussions that we normally have with strangers (like this one!) were basically impossible, except by radio in publicly accessible bands. I'm not that familiar with the how things worked, but I remember my dad spending at least an hour or two a day, chatting in morse code with people. They even had a kind of news service (I guess a bit like Usenet, except by hand) where they would relay messages around the world. It looked like a cool hobby, but I got access to a computer at a very early age and was instantly obsessed by it ;-)

blihp 8y ago
Another thing to remember about the 'old days' (80's and earlier) is that in addition to there being no public Internet for (most) people to hook into[1], was the expense of actually using the phone. Except for local calls (pretty much people in/near your city), everything was metered: we had zone calls where calling someone more than ~5-10 miles away incurred per-minute costs (iirc, $0.10-0.20/min), long distance calls (>30-50 miles) were more expensive (iirc, $0.30-0.50/min), and international (esp. overseas) calls were insane (you would typically try to keep conversations very short as the costs would start at $1-2/minute.) So amateur radio was a very cost effective way to communicate with like-minded people with very rapid payback. That said, a lot of people just liked chatting with strangers from far away places. [1] There were commercial services and BBS's but they were also relatively niche until the late 80's largely due to the actual cost of the phone call as described above.