Many years ago, in the Before Times

Many years ago, in the Before Times, you couldn’t call just anyone on the telephone. If they lived close enough, you could call them for “free”, but if they were far away, you might get charged several dollars a minute. Many people had long-distance calls intentionally turned off on their line for this very reason. If you wanted to meter how long you stayed on a long-distance call, you could use a phone card to buy ten bucks’ worth of telephone time. This might be enough for a half-hour to a not-so-distant city, or a minute and a half to a foreign country.

All of this was, of course, done on a telephone attached to the wall, with a separate handset you pulled off of a hook using a curly cord.

For those who want to live in the nostalgia of the inconvenient, backwards-pants-wearing years of the early 90s, you can purchase a used telephone card for only $200 as a collectible.