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 dialin

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.)