>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, "Local" calls weren't always free either. Each locality had their own set of excha

>Something people don't remember is that long distance calling was not free, "Local" calls weren't always free either. Each locality had their own set of exchanges that were considered "local" and beyond that it was "local-long distance." It was completely arbitrary. The "local-long distance" rates were often higher than the actual long distance since there was still something of a monopoly. Then in some areas they didn't have flat rate lines, where local calls calls were "free". There were message rate lines where calling different places within your locality cost a different number of message units per call, and only a fixed number of them were included with your service. It's very similar to cloud pricing now.