[sandymcmurray]

You paid by the minute to connect to CompuServe. I eventually found free software - shared in the CompuServe forums - that would dial up, collect messages from threads you had marked offline, then hang up your modem so you could read and reply at your leisure. This was my first exposure to shareware and a huge $$ saving. I contacted the developer and offered to pay him for this and he replied with, "No thanks. Just pay it forward." A couple of great lessons there.

[cdchn]

A lot of BBSes especially those that had FidoNet or similar distributed message boards let you download all the message boards as QWK packets and software like Blue Link and others. It was a great feature. Reading/replying to boards offline was a much nicer experience, in addition to the cost savings.

EDIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.

[andrelaszlo]

> the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.

Very sad story. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-cause...

[buildsjets]

Sounds like the criminal was due to be released recently.

https://x.com/textfiles/status/1782588930535150067

[ghaff]

Even free/subscription BBSs often involved pretty expensive per-minute phone charges. Intrastate in the US could actually cost more than interstate. Phone calls were expensive historically. Maybe more than $1/minute except for very local in today's currency.

Compuserve also had different rates depending on the baud rate you connected at.

Having a computer and getting online was a pretty expensive hobby in the 80s and early 90s.

[treebeard901]

There were several bugs with MajorBBS and certain door games that allowed people to trade in game credits for BBS time. Trade Wars 2002 had several bugs along the way. One you could script buying and selling a certain ship over and over, which would give you infinite in game credits. Just transfer it over for free BBS time.

Another one set your MajorBBS account to negative credits and had no lower bound. So once you used a door game bug to trigger that, you basically lived like a king because it worked as currency since you could trade credits to other users.

It was mostly to just have free BBS time since I couldnt afford it.

[kragen]

intracity was usually free though in the us

[EarlKing]

It really depended on the era and what area you were in. After the breakup of the Bell System, flat-rate areas (Zone 1 calling) spread across the RBOCs, but ultimately that still meant that metropolitan areas tended to benefit more than rural areas. The SF Bay Area was a prime example of this where the East Bay arguably had one of the best LATAs around that could reach dozens of bulletin boards.

Hopefully more Fidonet archives turn up in the coming years so people can understand what things were like back then. Ditto Compuserve... which, if I understand correctly, a large collection of documents relating thereto was acquired by the Internet Archive and awaits processing.

[kragen]

even in albuquerque i could reach dozens of bbses though

[ghaff]

It was not in the period I'm talking about. Your local calling area--maybe some adjacent exchanges/towns--was free but for me to call Boston from about an hour west was decidedly not free in the late 80s. Mileage may have varied of course.

And when cellular came in, I deliberately picked an area code based on the people I was most likely to call.

[jghn]

Yep, exactly. I think he boundaries weren't fuzzy, as in it wasn't "the towns adjacent to you" but there were lines. I'm pretty sure it cost money to call my friends who lived one town over for instance, but I know it was the case for friends who lived 2-3 towns over.

[kragen]

right, late 80s. where i lived at the time (albuquerque or socorro) the local calling area was a whole city or group of nearby towns, but if you were to drive in any direction for an hour you'd be out in the middle of the wilderness, so it doesn't sound like your situation was actually different

[ghaff]

At the time I was in a reasonably far out suburb and there really weren’t local BBSs of note. Certainly not wilderness but close to an hour out of Boston. May have been a couple of local BBSs but they’d have been one or two line operations.

[cbozeman]

> DIT: and as another bit of random trivia the guy who invented QWK format died of a heart attack after being swatted by an 18 year old who was after his @Tennessee twitter username.

That username should be permanently retired and the 18 year old prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for crimes which the law would or could hold him or her accountable.

[cdchn]

The swatter got 5 years in prison. The maximum allowed by law. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/07/serial-swatter-who-cause...

[mmmlinux]

Only got 5 years for that and a number of other similar harassment related incidents.

[kragen]

also fidonet itself worked like this; at mail hour, or when you asked it to, your node would dial up other nodes to exchange mail with them. you could set up a 'point' that was like a mini-node, not listed in the node list, that only talked to one full-fledged node.

[loloquwowndueo]

Was it Blue link or Blue Wave?

A lot of us used SLMR (silly little mail reader) instead as it was cheaper than blue wave.

[csixty4]

I loved Blue Wave. My first "real" open source C program loaded your editor and tacked a signature onto the text when you exited. I then set that program as the editor in Blue Wave and got signatures on my BBS posts just like on Usenet.

[cdchn]

Blue Wave it was. There was another one I think it was QWKlink or something, too.

[kmoser]

I discovered that if you were still connected when your account expired, you wouldn't get kicked off. I remember connecting just before the end of a trial period and staying up into the wee hours (well past the 12 midnight expiration time) downloading tons of Commodore 64 sound files.

[ohjeez]

Initially called Zapcis, Howard Benner released the new shareware version as TAPCIS, which IIRC cost $35 to register. Worth every penny because I was paying long distance rates to access CompuServe, with phone bills regularly exceeding $250/month. (There were a few competitors, such as OZCIS.)

Far beyond automation, TAPCIS had messaging features that I wish I had today, particularly as sysop/moderator. For instance, if a message thread unraveled (as they do), and the conversation wandered from "snow tires two or four?" to "favorite radio stations"... the sysop could type Ctrl-S and snip into a new thread with a more suitable title. I WANT THIS EVERY SINGLE DAY.

[onemoresoop]

I remember those times as well, I remember using Listserv quite a bit, sending the Listserv commands while offline, composing emails/replying to emails and then connecting briefly to the mail server. And yes, the phone was paid by the minute, it wasn't very cheap so I'd try to lower the usage as much as I could. And then there were the BBS-es where I'd spend the time limit (I think it was 30 minutes) when I could find a line that wasn't busy...

[SpaceNoodled]

Do you recall who that was? Name & fame?

[rqtwteye]

I think I had a software called wigwam.

[chgs]

In the U.K. you paid by the minute for phone calls too. That’s on top of tue per minute compuserve charge and the monthly charge.

While the extra charges ok top of the phone we’re slowly removed, the genral per monute phone costs remained well into the late 90s and the gradual rollout of broadband (512k adsl)