On Thu, 2010-11-04 at 12:44 -0700, Jeroen van Aart wrote:
In most if not all European countries (and likely most other countries too) you pay a fee per time unit (say per minute) for local calls.
in addition to a relatively high monthly "standing charge" subscription fee I might add! In the UK, this has really only changed in the last 3 or 4 years for most users of the national telco, of whom in it now possible to buy a "option plan" of free calls each month at extra charge above the basic. It's no coincidence that I learned to type very, very fast in the early 1980s, before global email became prevalent for the public and the majority of comms were done on BBSs of one sort or another. Only mail retrieval could be scripted, all "proto-browsing" was done live and against a rapidly-ticking financial clock. Conversations with colleagues across the pond were filled with silent envy for a _very_ long time, until approx 1997 iirc :) Gord