this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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I don’t remember anyone charging long distance for internet packets.
In fact, I don’t even know how you’d meter that? Did they just charge you for open TCP sockets outside their own CO? Wtf who did that fucking bullshit? I’ve had a dozen different ISPs since about 1996 and no one ever charged long distance for packets
Okay, Zen_Shinobi got the details wrong but the landscape right. It wasn't that difficult to rack up a long distance bill with your computer. It usually wasn't your ISP collecting that bill though.
In the early 90's it wasn't uncommon to have an ISP that wasn't your phone company. AOL, Compuserve, all the little Randonets. The first ISP my father used was NANDOnet, which was operated by the Charlotte News and Observer. We were in a different area code than Charlotte, so using his state of the art 14.4kbaud modem to access NANDOnet accrued a long distance charge like any other phone call to Charlotte. You don't remember the likes of Earthlink and AOL advertising "more local numbers?"
Well into the 90's, you'd have use for a modem even if you didn't have an ISP at all. BBSes were often a computer with a modem attached. You'd dial directly into that BBS. No TCP/IP at all going on; you essentially had two computers connected together with an arbitrarily long serial cable. These BBS systems were owned by random nerds scattered across North America, so using BBS systems almost certainly meant long-distance phone calls. Doing things like multiplayer gaming in something like Doom over a modem could, theoretically, be done over a long distance line if you were that kind of decadent.
Anyone remember porn dialers? There were probably other industry sectors that used this business model, but it was commonly associated with the early internet porn industry. It's the 1990's, nobody's got a Venmo account, hell you can't rely on every American having a Visa card. How do you bill your customers? What you do is you host a website purely for advertisement purposes, you don't ship your actual product over HTTP at all. You offer a download of a scummy piece of software that uses the customer's modem to directly dial your 900 number. They can download...almost certainly pictures probably not video, while connected, and then their phone company bills the customer for the toll. Not unlike a phone sex service, same business model, slightly different product.
Re-read what they said. They're talking about modem dialup to a long distance number, so the phone call the modem made was long distance and hence charged at the higher rate.
It's ok to not get it, this is pre internet and a very long time ago
Early internet, yes. Not pre-internet.
BBS's pre-date what we know as the internet - that is, commercially available interconnections via an ISP to a "wider web" of servers. Pedantically you can argue there is overlap with the period when only universities and a couple of tech companies were interconnected but calling that the internet is like calling a horse and buggy a car because it has wheels and carries passengers
I think we may just have a difference in perspective. I would call a buggy a car because it has wheels and carries passengers. I wouldn't call it an automobile, because that implies an automatic engine, but I would consider it a form of car.
Same with BBS/Internet. Once you have a series of servers interconnected, and have access to them via an ISP, yes. That is a form of early internet. It dates back to something like the 1960s. Going back to NASA and government usage.
So I think we're talking about the same thing with just a difference of perspective and opinion.
But you didn't access a BBS via an ISP, that's one of the key differences. You dialled your modem directly into the BBS