r/bbs • u/Bigheaded_1 • 4d ago
Phone bills
Today I was thinking about 1989 and going from a 2400 baud to a USRobotics HST 14.4k. And somehow our phone bill went up even more. It also made me remember when I used to dial 0 to find out how much it would cost to call an area code. Depending on the time of the day the price would change so I always checked. Yet somehow I still had plenty of $200 phone bills that I had to work my ass off to pay my dad back. I'm lucky he was against violence or I would have gotten plenty of beatings lol. And the sad thing is, the bills would have been even higher but there were a lot of boards I'd had to re-dial for 2-3 hours straight to get thru lol. And about 1/2 of those times, only to find out I was assed out and didn't have enough credits to download what I wanted and didn't have any shit new enough to upload. Bastard 15 year old sysops who only accepted 0 day warez were the bane of my existance. I had no ratios on my board, but my board was decent at best.
Today everybody gets unlimited calling anywhere, and ironically there are like 6 dial up BBS's still in existance if I wanted to go get a modem and use it lol. I'm trying to imagine 1987-1995 with unlimited nationwide calling. I would've downloaded everything in existance, well until I ran out of credits and got banned everywhere for being a leech.
This is just an old guy (50) reminiscing back in the 80s when he thought he was l33t. Respect to anyone from that era who had huge phone bills and made it out alive. And hello if anyone's from 714 or 951, well it woulda been 909 back then.
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u/quaglandx3 4d ago
I’m from the Valley, so 818, and I had a toll charge map I took from the back of the PacBell White pages so I wasn’t getting charged for calling a bbs in Sunland-Tujunga from Sherman Oaks.
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u/Bigheaded_1 3d ago
818! For some reason I remember calling Pacific Brigade and racking up a stupid phone bill from it. I was 714 and foolishly thought since it was fairly close it wouldn't cost too much. That's when I found out local LD was hellish
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u/quaglandx3 3d ago
Those days were pretty funny, sometimes it was cheaper to call a BBS in 213 than it was in 818.
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u/circletheory 3d ago
I was also in the 818 area code. That code covered a huge area. My child brain thought any phone number with the same area code was a free local number. That was until my parents got the phone bill. I learned a harsh lesson about zones that day.
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u/muffinman8679 2d ago
yeah....many times the local radius was only a few miles.....I lived in a city....and the other end of town was long distance...and it was only about 5 miles away
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u/splaspood 3d ago
I too remember some absurd phone bills that made my parents scream. Another story. I worked for this small business while I was in high school and on a Friday the office manager had me help him dial up for internet access. It was a local number, but at the time business lines were metered even for local calls. (Or at least this company's lines were). I went home for the day and came back on monday. Just as I was getting ready to leave on monday the office manager asks me to look at his machine as it wouldn't connect to the internet..
I check it out and find that the modem is already in use.. just as I maximize the window for the dialer I see it roll over to like 72hrs. I called the phone company and plead my case and eventually some nice person asked me how long I thought the call should have been and adjusted the bill down to a 30min call.. That one call, before adjustment, was over $500.
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u/jhplano 3d ago
My pal and I went to play with his dad’s new IBM PC, we were probably in the 8th grade, his dad had a little shop to buy Saving and Loans assets; anyway my friend knew of a bbs in London we called, from Kansas. His dad got a big bill, and we barely knew what we were doing of course. Pretty funny.
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u/jayinfidel 3d ago
In NYC Ma Bell had a thing in the '90s where they would look at your average book for the last few months and just charge you that going forward (for local calling). So I just played it safe for a few months then started war dialing numbers looking for...anything. phone bills came in manila envelopes after that
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u/RandolfRichardson 3d ago
Phone companies loved BBS users, but never seemed to want to admit it publicly. Nowadays they'd be advertising "BBS quality phone lines" to encourage more BBS use if long distance costs were still complicated and the internet hadn't become mainstream.
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u/nelgin 3d ago
Growing up in the UK in the 80's, no such thing as free local calls, unless in the US, so every call was charges, some at a local rate, some at long distance. There were a few other rates between big cities and the wider local area. It was easy to rack up a large bill, especially since you're billed every quarter and not monthy.
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u/cjxmtn 3d ago
Our local calling was a very small footprint in the 80s/90s. At least in So Cal with Pacific Bell. If I called outside of like a 5-10 mile radius, we got charged a local long distance fee.
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u/Bigheaded_1 1d ago edited 1d ago
And calling 2 cities over might cost more than calling 2 states over. The minutely rates made zero sense, there was no rhyme or reason for how they came up with them. It being cheaper late at night did make sense, but I was in school and couldn't stay up, so I ended up always calling when it was maximum charge. And genius 14 year old me thought having got a 14.4k modem would mean the bill would have to go down, because 14.4k > 2400. Unfortunately, I called more boards and spent way more time downloading stuff. I remember a few good LD boards that gave the high speed users special access to leech and I took full advantage of it.
I was in So Cal too and I swear Pac Bell was running a scam on us with how tiny the local calling radius was. But I think my dad ended up switching to GTE and it might have even been worse.
Damn I hadn't even thought of GTE for 30 years until right now I wonder what happened to them.
EDIT
I just Googled and GTE became Verizon! Well Verizon's ripping me a new asshole with how much my cell phone bill is, so it's fitting GTE's still screwing me 35 years later.
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u/RolandMT32 sysop 3d ago
I suppose I'm lucky I grew up in an area that had a lot of local BBSes. I generally only called the local ones, so there were no extra phone charges.
I ran a BBS back then too, and then started up one again in 2007 on the internet. I just added a dialup line last year, so people can dial into my BBS if they wanted to.
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u/Unhappy-Command860 3d ago
I was 714 area code for my bbs. Eatmyshorts bbs
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u/Bigheaded_1 1d ago
Hell you're board could have been right on the beach in Hunginton Beach all the way to San Bernadino. It made no sense how damn big 714 was. My board was in 714, which became 562, then I moved back to Riverside which was 909 but had been 714 and became 951 after a few years. The IE part of 714 was pretty trash for BBS'es, like for everything else OC was just better than the IE lol. I fondly remember the OC part of the 714 being pretty bad ass for boards. I called Alien Workshop and The Beasts Domain every day. I don't remember your board, but that's a late 80s BBS name if I've ever heard one. And since my memory sucks and I don't remember 95% of the boards I was on, I'm sure I called it at least once. What software did you run?
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u/bwann 3d ago
I lived in a rural area so everything was a long distance call to me. I quickly learned to study my parents phone bill, noting the cost per minute of various states at different times, and the new billing period started on the 16th of every month. I would make an itemized list of every call I made, to the minute, to tally my cost. It was exciting when 6pm of the 16th rolled around when my budget reset and evening rates kicked in, and I could finally call to download the latest new thing! I paid for it by raking hay, mowing lawns, fixing computers, or small welding jobs.
I was all over the 1-800 BBSs back then, leeching whatever files or messages I could from them, and then writing scripts to log in to get my messages in the 4 minutes/day limit some had.
Later I started using CRIS/BBS Direct for $5/hour toll free which was technically cheaper than long distance to a lot of big boards I used, but it had shell and SLIP access so I used it even more! I decided it would be a cool thing to provide local calling to other people like me and started an ISP. All because of long distance bills.
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u/cjxmtn 3d ago
Yet somehow I still had plenty of $200 phone bills that I had to work my ass off to pay my dad back.
I feel this one in my core. I remember calling the midwest to download KBBS software from the developers to test it out. I had to work that bill off over a summer.
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u/Bigheaded_1 3d ago
LOL every time I heard about a new BBS software it doesn't matter where I had to call and get it. Then I'd install it, run it for a week and it always sucked. So BOOM deleted and never touched again. When you're on 2400 baud calling at like 90 cents a minute or whatever, and half the time you had to upload something to get download credits, that shit wasn't smart to do. And spending half an hour reading and posting messages when it ended up being $5 was even less smart. Best times ever though I wouldn't trade the BBS era for anything, it was so much better than the internet today.
I had to have every BBS software in existance for some reason. And I still managed to have a decent amount of regular users. Who had to reapply every 2 weeks because I switched software again.
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u/cjxmtn 3d ago
Yep I was on a 2400 at the time still, and I had to run it overnight to download. Funny is it was probably around 1MB in size too. Same way with you though, I switched BBS software way too often, always going back to PC Board.
Best times ever though I wouldn't trade the BBS era for anything, it was so much better than the internet today.
100% .. it was a very specialized community of people who were interested in the technology as much or more than the actual content. And knowing something very few other people knew. Trying to explain how I could use a telephone to log in to another person's computer never went well.
I see you post in r/riverside. I grew up in Riverside, so very possible we both were on the same BBS's.
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u/rumdumpstr 3d ago
I had to try to download RIPterm 3 times, but the phone co was nice and when I explained the first two corrupted downloads they gave a credit,
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u/wdatkinson 3d ago
I was a 15/16 year old that got charged business rates for my BBS line, because they saw it as a business. Good ole GTE.
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u/SoCalGuy999 1d ago
Yeah dude- my dad almost whipped my ass one month when he threw a phone bill at me- pages of calls. Who knew you could be charged long distance for calling numbers in your own area code? Then I started phreaking- problem solved.
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u/samalex01 1d ago
Late 80s and early 90s we had about 30-50 local BBSes so i rarely needed to dial LD, but I did call the operator to get costs when I did. I also had a 10 page list of 800 BBSes i spent months doing through, it was awesome!
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u/IJustWantToWorkOK 1d ago
Greetings from former fido 1:306/36.
We used call-forwarding to get around it.
Fort Collins could call Berthoud, but was LD to Longmont. Berthoud could call Longmont, tho. Little bit of scripting work, and we had a system that would answer, present you with a list of boards in Longmont and Fort Collins, and have you select one. It would then tell you to call back in 30 seconds. Behind the scenes, my modem was dialing the codes to set up the forward to your selected board. After one minute, it would undo the forward and reset.
What I though was cool, was that undoing the forwarding, didn't kill the active call. You could be talking to Longmont all day, and this board would be answering the next call.
Also had my phone lines connected under an invented name because Phone Cops. Two years later, they called me to tell me 'your name and SSN don't match!' (because both were invented). Asked them 'well, SOMEBODY'S been paying the bill religiously for 2 years ... does it matter?"
Apparently, it did.
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u/iheartbaconsalt 4d ago
Pssset dude, you were supposed to avoid the long distance bills with those handy calling card number generators. I was SO HAPPY when I saw our phone bills were clear at home and my mother never knew.