Lucky. You had another provider. In the US, one of the key things that Prodigy (remember them?), AOL and some other providers had was that they had a lot of "

Lucky. You had another provider. In the US, one of the key things that Prodigy (remember them?), AOL and some other providers had was that they had a lot of "local" phone numbers instead of "long distance". This meant that your connection was a single charge and didn't rack up with time. That was a BIG deal. In addition, email addresses were still sufficiently uncommon and hard enough to get hold of that people were using "unmentionable" means to get them even up to about 1994 or so.