Call charges in 1980
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'[...] nighttime phone rates were about US$.50 for three minutes; that sounds about right, though even within the US rates varied with distance.
In that time, at 300 bps—30 bytes per second—you could send at most 5400 bytes; given protocol overhead, we conservatively estimated 3000 bytes, or a kilobyte per minute. To pick an arbitrary point of comparison, the source to uucp is about 120KB; at 1KB/sec, that's two hours, or US$20. Adjusting for inflation, that's over US$60 in today's money—and most people don't want most packages.'
(From The Early History of Usenet, Part VII: The Public Announcement.)
Tags: quote, ойті
Authors: ag