Hello Tony,

On Sunday November 24 2019 18:38, you wrote to me:

 MvV>> second half of the ninetees. I'd say the last Dutch user was
 MvV>> spotted in the wild in 1996. With the users went the BBS. Look
 MvV>> at the MO flags in the nodelist.

 TL> In Australia, local calls weren't free, but they were untimed, which
 TL> meand users tended to have long sessions, to get the most out of their
 TL> calls as possible.

The situation of untimed local calls at a fixed price for one call, that is how
it was in The Netherlands too. Until about 1985. Then the powers that be
changed it to a metered rate. An official reason was never given, but there
were two main theories:

1) The coming of the BBS. Users made calls lasting hourm sometimes days. I
myself have been guilty of keeping the line open for a whole weekend. At the
time the exchanges were designed to handle a maximum of 7 simultaneous calls
per 100 subscribers. No dial tone fo #8.

2) Local areas overlapped. Big national comapnies created a web of linkes local
calls that were open 24/7 to have cheap "fixed private lines" to route their
phone calls.

 TL> Offline mail was heavily used to save mail reading time, and the
 TL> terminal sessions were often used for browsing files, multiline chat
 TL> and door games.  Then mail could be read after one's online time
 TL> expired. :)

Metered local calls is what killed the BBS here.

(I wrote a Fidonews article about that, but that was a long time ago..)

Cheers, Michiel

--- GoldED+/W32-MSVC 1.1.5-b20170303