Also this indicated quite a good understanding of 'hacker' culture at the time. It's from http://phrack.org/issues/7/3.html
Oh, definitely. I'm just intrigued by how my perception of that culture has altered over time, especially as I've become more involved with the world 'behind the curtain', and the true magnitude of the industry required to produce all our modern amenities.
Long distance calls in those days were prohibitively expensive. He was writing about the public telephone system and BBSs, not the Internet. You did not dial a BBS outside of your area code (and sometimes not even within the area code because there might be toll charges).
Yeah, I was around then.
Long distance calls were expensive because they were trying to pay off billions of dollars of basic infrastructure - the phone network that we're only now replacing nearly half a century later. Those fancy exchanges that the phreakers were exploiting? Those had to be invented, prototyped, tested, mass produced, installed, maintained... and that's not even considering tens of thousands of kilometers of telephone wires and poles, negotiating land rights, etc.
We only think of long distance communication as being next-to-free today because our information tech is already bootstrapped, computers are a billion times more powerful, and the market across which those costs are amortized are at least a million times bigger.
This sounds like it was written by an angsty 14-year-old who has no idea what actually goes into building and maintaining public infrastructure. Not, of course, that telecoms are always good citizens, but still.