At a time where no one had heard of the Internet and only a few scattered people used BBSes, one’s net worth could be estimated by the number of scopes that he owned. Even as a youngster, I owned two scopes of my own.
So what exactly were these “scopes?” Nothing more than additional charges to your local phone bill that extended the your “local calling area.” So one of my scopes allowed me to call Cherry Hill for 20 hours a month for $3 rather than pay 10 or 12 cents a minute. And that extra space meant a lot of extra BBSes that I could waste my time on.
Even then, scopes were rarely mentioned by the phone company (you had to specifically ask about them), but today I don’t think they even exist. Kind of a shame, really, as they were good status symbol indicators of the early online world. -ram
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