> If you were calling someone in the US but more than a hundred miles or so away, you'd literally get a bill for every minute you spent on the phone. Far less

> If you were calling someone in the US but more than a hundred miles or so away, you'd literally get a bill for every minute you spent on the phone. Far less distance than that. I grew up in the central city of a small metropolitan area, and in the 80s and 90s, calls from one suburb to another (depending on the exact pair) were sometimes long-distance. As little as 15 miles. All within one area code. OTOH, you could make local calls from close-in parts of Northern Virginia to DC even though they had different area codes.