I grew up in LA in the 80s. Yes, "local" calls were free and that probably covered most of the people you went to school with. If you had friends or family members 20+ miles away (commonplace for car-centric LA) it was pretty easy to rack up huge bills.

My first boyfriend was born in the late 70s (UK) and hos family didn’t own a phone — not one landline phone between them — because phones were too expensive.

I was early 80s, and watched landline and mobile costs fall to negligible levels.

My current girlfriend was born in the late 80s (USA, but world traveler with family work), and I think from the start of highschool onward pretty much always assumed there was an internet connection and too-cheap-to-care calls even before everyone made their own VOIP/video chat messengers.

Most of us had family outside of our area code which meant large bills if we wanted to talk to them on a regular basis.

I understand, although we can argue about 'Most of us' versus 'Some of us'. My experience was that my need for out of area calls went up only after I moved from where I went to high school to where I went to college. And many of my friends stayed local. There was a great piece in the NY Times about 3 years ago that talked about how the typical American lives within 18 miles of their family.(found it https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...)

Something that came with the Internet, and didn't exist for me prior to its existence, was a large body of friends who were not local to me. Today, if I had to go back to metered long distance rather than what we have today it would absolutely be cost prohibitive! And clearly some people move around more than others and for them they might have a lot of friends and family outside of their local calling region back then as well.

The bottom line is that I can see the point you were making but I think we disagree on the magnitude of its impact on the general population that was living with phones at that time.