At one time, I had seven POTS telephone lines in my home.

[MineralMan]

Both my wife and I were (and are) freelance writers who worked (still do) at home. We were always early adopters, and were constantly expanding the technology in our home office. The telephone company loved us. At one point, we had the following phone lines in our house, all pre-Internet. We were on GEnie and Compuserve, though:

My office voice line - this was the original house line
Her office voice line
My modem line
Her modem line
A line for the fax machine
Two lines for a business BBS running Wildcat software - Revolutionary. Two people could be logged in at the same time, or even three if I was sitting at the keyboard.

The phone company had to run three separate lines from the pole on the street and installed a commercial box on the house. They were puzzled.

It's hard for me to believe today. Our phone bill was $$$.

[tridim]

1. I started my BBS on my parent's phone line.

But I was 13, so I didn't realize that people would call the number all day even though the BBS was only open during specific hours at night. Ooops, sorry Mom and Dad!

They received piercing modem calls for months after that.

I never had my own line until college. By then I was dialing in to the university's VAX for primitive internet access.

[MineralMan]

3. The BBS was for my shareware software company.

It also had a separate area that required an additional login for work-related stuff. It was busy 24/7, which is why I added the second line. Then, it was still busy 24/7. It had a discussion area with a wide range of topics, and even allowed the two logged-in people to chat.

It ran on an IBM AT clone with a HUGE 80MB Seagate hard drive that got hot enough to fry an egg at times. Its read/write arm made a chuckling sound when it was moving, which was a background noise that let me know when the BBS was active and had users. The best part was that I was able to get the phone lines for it on a flat rate basis of just $8.35/mo., since no outgoing calls were made on it. Those lines were in use over 80% of the time, measured by the activity log on the BBS. The poor phone company. I did have to pay more, though, to roll the BBS phone number to the second line when the first one was busy. I think that was $5 more per month.

[RKP5637]

2. We've come a long way! I remember similar! Some things have gotten cheaper in life today!

I think we had five: 2 house, 2 modem and one dedicated fax. The phone bill was worse than the electrical bill during heavy summer AC season.

[MineralMan]

4. Yup. It was a business expense, though, and times

were good then, so it wasn't a bother.