The big deal about cost was that in the 80s phone calls were charged by the minute for anything beyond a very small local areas (even across town might be per-m

The big deal about cost was that in the 80s phone calls were charged by the minute for anything beyond a very small local areas (even across town might be per-minute, for some towns). So unless you happened to have a BBS within a local dialing range, it became very expensive very fast due to phone company bill. For me at the time there was only one BBS within "local long distance" range (IIRC about 25c/minute) but it didn't have much content. Every interesting BBS I read about was over $1/min long distance charges away. This kept me out of the BBS scene through all of the 80s. By the late 80s I got real Internet access through university, so didn't pay attention to BBSs after that. I did briefly play with BBS in the mid 90s when I was living in an area where I could call into several ones for free, but by then it was the decline of the era anyway.