Comment by codazoda
17 hours ago
PoiZoN BBS Sysop chiming in. I ran the BBS on a free phone line I found in my childhood bedroom. I alerted the phone company and a tech spent a day trying to untangle it, but gave up at the end of his shift. He even stopped by to tell me it wouldn’t be fixed.
I didn’t know the phone number, so I bought a Caller ID box, hooked it to my home line, and phoned home. It wasn’t long before every BBS in town had a listing for it.
That's awesome.
I had to wait til I was old enough to get a phone line in my own name before running a BBS. And also til I had a modem that would auto-answer, which was not a given back then!
But I confess my first question for a working but unassigned phone line would be: who gets the bill for long distance calls?
I had access to no-cost long distance calling through other administrative oversights, but they were a bit more effort to maintain! :)
Man that tech was cool and did you a solid.
Many techs went to work for the phone companies for a reason.