On Thursday, December 27, 2018, 2:10:02 PM PST, Zenaan Harkness <zen@freedbms.net> wrote:


> > Op 26-12-18 om 23:21 schreef jim bell:
> > > I think there was a time in the late 1970's when phone companies
> > > expressed resentment that their users were employing modems on their
> > > phone lines.

On Thu, Dec 27, 2018 at 04:37:01PM -0300, Juan wrote:


>> > meant that you could
>> > get on the Internet almost indefinitely if an Internet access point was
>> > within reach, f.i. university or library.
>> > This extra and sustained load could cause technical issues in itself,
>> > but it also cost the phone companies a pretty penny in lost income. No
>> > wonder the phone companies were quick to change their tariffs to usage
>> > based.
>
>>     Hardly surprising.



>Re "it also cost the phone companies a pretty penny in lost income":

>This is an example of insidiously successful 'thought control' or
effective/de-facto control of our conversation.


Generally, I agree.  However, I should point out that if (then-existing) telephone switches were 'blocking', meaning not allowing essentially complete simultaneous connectivity,  such connectivity becomes a limited commodity that tends to have to be divvied out, perhaps by price.  That probably didn't happen in most of America, because phone service contracts tended to be a fixed monthly cost, rather than in proportion to monthly usage. 

Both the 1ESS and the 1AESS were 'blocking'.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_One_Electronic_Switching_System     
They didn't allow all phone circuits to be active at one time.  

×
As that article states,

 "Most of the thousands of 1ESS and 1AESS offices in the USA were replaced in the 1990s by DMS-100, 5ESS Switch and other digital switches, and since 2010 also by packet switches. As of late 2014, just over 20 1AESS installations remained in the North American network, which were located mostly in AT&T's legacy BellSouth and AT&T's legacy Southwestern Bell states, especially in the Atlanta GA metro area, the Saint Louis MO metro area, and in the Dallas/Fort Worth TX metro area. In 2015, AT&T did not renew a support contract with Alcatel-Lucent (now Nokia) for the 1AESS systems still in operation and notified Alcatel-Lucent of its intent to remove them all from service by 2017. As a result, Alcatel-Lucent dismantled the last 1AESS lab at the Naperville Bell Labs location in 2015, and announced the discontinuation of support for the 1AESS.[7] In 2017, AT&T completed the removal of remaining 1AESS systems by moving customers to other newer technology switches, typically with Genband switches with TDM trunking only.The last known 1AESS switch was in Odessa, TX (Odessa Lincoln Federal wirecenter ODSSTXLI). It was disconnected from service around June 3, 2017 and cut over to a Genband G5/G6 packet switch."
[quote ends]

I don't know the statistics, but I'd imagine that modem usage in the 1970's was so insignificant to not cause a problem.  The 1980's was a decade where there was increasing computer bulletin-board system usage.  But, by the early-to-mid 1990's, heavy usage of modems on POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) lines occurred.  This made necessary the changeover described in the paragraph above.