[robin_reala]

Yep, same on CiX in the UK. We had to pay for phone access by the minute, so an offline reader was absolutely necessary.

[tyfon]

Same here in Norway. I remember being jealous of people in the US with a flat local rate. We paid by the minute for everything, even more for "long" distance. My father got rather upset when we got a phone bill of 5000 NOK back in the day because I had downloaded something from a BBS in Bergen from Oslo.

Funny how things have reversed, now we are the ones with unmetered fast internet and the US has datacaps and whatnot.

[isostatic]

Did CiX also charge per-minute access on top of that? Compuserve did.

In the late 90s, pre DSL, there was a pressure group to allow unmetered phone calls. The site is still online: http://www.unmetered.org.uk/