'[...] 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.'