X.25 was such a pain to run a system on. Each connection was basically a collect call billed to the service provider, and it wasn’t really possible to find how much each connection was costing to bill the user accordingly.
We were running a “Canada-wide” multi-user BBS system on it, and then one of our users logged in on New Years to wish everyone the best, from his sailboat, in the Caribbean, using his TRS Model 100 with modem, via ship-to-shore telephone, to a X.25 provider there.
After the nerdgasm of how cool that was, someone (probably me) said “Um, how much more did that connection cost us compared to a local connection, and how do we bill it?” I forget the details, but we had to block international connections to protect against uncontrolled cost spikes.
The Internet is much better.
