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You might enjoy this. I was growing up in the countryside in the late 80s when BBSs and services like AOL started to take off. We were too far away from anythin

You might enjoy this. I was growing up in the countryside in the late 80s when BBSs and services like AOL started to take off. We were too far away from anything like a city for them to be a local call, so my use of them was extremely limited. I had a friend who lived a few miles closer to the nearest city and they were a local call for him, so we’d always spend a lot of time on the BBSs at his place. Eventually we came up with a brilliant scheme. My friend’s father had a home office with a dedicated phone line. He had signed up for call forwarding so he could be reached when he was away. But outside of business hours, the line sat idle. The process of changing the forwarding number was totally automated and free. Calling his number was a local call for me, and calling the interesting services was a local call for him, so I could bounce through his line (with his permission, of course) to call these things for free.

techsupporter 8y ago
I do enjoy this, thanks. It reminded me of another memory: Growing up, my house sat on the border between two of the incumbents. It was odd enough that dialing the Operator got the pre-connection announcement for the incumbent that mailed us the phone bill but calling Information (411) got the pre-connection announcement for the adjacent city's incumbent. This also happened to make my hometown one of a handful that could call local numbers served by either incumbent in the same area code. I was doing work for a tiny ISP and my boss asked my parents if he could put a Livingston PortMaster 16 in our house and hook up 16 phone lines in exchange for paying my parents a small sum and giving us free Internet access by sharing the connection with the PortMaster. We agreed and, thus, I became one of the few teenagers at the time to have high-speed wired Internet at my house. (None of my peers gave a crap but I loved it.) The phone company was less overjoyed because we consumed every available pair in the cross-connect box at the end of the street and nobody on our block or the next one over could get an additional phone line for months until a new box was added. (As a capper to the story: A second cross-connect was added...but the tiny ISP went bankrupt a month later and all 16 of those lines were disconnected, rendering the shiny new cross-connect pointless.)

techsupporter 8y ago

I do enjoy this, thanks. It reminded me of another memory: Growing up, my house sat on the border between two of the incumbents. It was odd enough that dialing the Operator got the pre-connection announcement for the incumbent that mailed us the phone bill but calling Information (411) got the pre-connection announcement for the adjacent city's incumbent. This also happened to make my hometown one of a handful that could call local numbers served by either incumbent in the same area code. I was doing work for a tiny ISP and my boss asked my parents if he could put a Livingston PortMaster 16 in our house and hook up 16 phone lines in exchange for paying my parents a small sum and giving us free Internet access by sharing the connection with the PortMaster. We agreed and, thus, I became one of the few teenagers at the time to have high-speed wired Internet at my house. (None of my peers gave a crap but I loved it.) The phone company was less overjoyed because we consumed every available pair in the cross-connect box at the end of the street and nobody on our block or the next one over could get an additional phone line for months until a new box was added. (As a capper to the story: A second cross-connect was added...but the tiny ISP went bankrupt a month later and all 16 of those lines were disconnected, rendering the shiny new cross-connect pointless.)