On Tue, 08 Jan 2019 17:19:45 -0000, Mark Lloyd wrote:

On 1/7/19 7:55 PM, Commander Kinsey wrote:

[snip]

I didn't know much about
internet access and browsers. I had Compuserve (I actually had a way to
determine if it had any local phone numbers then)

What do you mean by the bit in brackets?
In the eighties, I belonged to a Commodore home computer user group. In
one of their newsletters, there was an article on some free things you
could do with your modem. There was a toll-free number to connect to
Telenet (one of the dial-up services you could use to access Compuserve)
and find out if there were any local numbers for Compuserve. I live in a
small enough town, there were no local numbers here, until 1995 when the
phone company extended the local calling area. Compuserve was the only
online service I knew how to check accessibility for without signing up
first.

I had a 28.8Kbps modem that worked fine on bulletin boards, but was
erratic with Windows, Making the Compuserve experience even worse.

In the 90s in the UK, BT (the main phone company) introduced freephone numbers to dial with a modem. It didn't take them long to realise we were costing them money by dialling two at once, linking two modems together, and getting a 24/7 100kbps connection. Then they tried to claim that the word "anytime" (the name of their service) didn't actually mean anytime you liked, only some of it. Redefining an English word put a lot of customers off and we left them in droves.