Subj : Re: Still Active
To   : Morningstarr
From : poindexter FORTRAN
Date : Sat Jan 24 2026 09:59:21

-=> Morningstarr wrote to Nightfox <=-

 Mo> Yeah major bbs had a gui, it looked like windows 95ish. Reminded me of
 Mo> aol. You could multitask in it too. Good times!

There was a period of time where companies used POTS and
store-and-forward networks to interoperate, before the internet was
common. I remember setting up Worldgroup, and it was a great way to
communicate with a couple of development studios we had.

I know I've told this story multiple times, but my company ended up with
a $400 phone bill because the lead developer set it up to poll every 10
minutes.

The developers were in that local toll area, where calls were expensive
and you couldn't route them easily over long distance lines. It cost
more to call 3 cities down than it did to call another state.

I tried to explain the idea behind crashmail to him, but he didn't want
to make a change, in case some important change happened on the far end.
He didn't want them paying for calls, so it had to be set up that way.

I had a telco broker who had some interesting ideas. He suggested I
purchase call forward on busy service for the hub. It was $3/month. Set
the call forward busy destination to the number in the toll area. Set
the hub to call "itself". The line was busy, naturally, and forwarded to
the destination for essentially a penny a call.

They could continue calling every 10 minutes, and the bill dropped to
almost nothing, since there was no toll charge on the calls.


 
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