When I was a kid, my dad worked for the government in a handful of fairly remote places, and even though I could dial in to places like TOTSE and The WELL, it cost a ton of money in long distance fees. As a result, there was always incentive to get access to 1-800 numbers that did things like give you a telnet prompt or a modem in a different city. I remember the first time I got access to a network that had internet connected hosts distributed around North America, and I sent an email across the country that arrived in the blink of an eye. When I saw that I was like, "Who the hell is paying for this...this dedicated high speed phone call that's probably been running nonstop since I was in kindergarten?" It didn't occur to me that by the late 80s and early 90s, a "phone call" was really more of a metaphysical fiction than anything else.