this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
287 points (98.0% liked)

RetroGaming

25505 readers
120 users here now

Vintage gaming community.

Rules:

  1. Be kind.
  2. No spam, AI slop, or soliciting for money.
  3. No racism or other bigotry allowed.
  4. Obviously nothing illegal.

If you see these please report them.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Xylinna@lemmy.world
Tenthrow@lemmy.world
gts@lemmy.world
287
How gamers were nickel and dimed in 80s and 90s (besides arcades) (europe.pub)
submitted 1 week ago by ICastFist@programming.dev to c/retrogaming@lemmy.world
56 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Granted, the "nickel and diming" of hotline numbers (1900, 0900, etc) was nowhere as bad as today's cash shops, but a lot of us simply forgot they were always hungry for all our money

Here's a bunch other hotline ads for you to peruse - https://www.retromags.com/gallery/category/1729-telephone-hotlines/

PS: I never understood these american numbers that used letters, how were you supposed to know what was the actual number?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

Yup. But that assistance in retrospect feels like the first time we encountered something alike. It prints faster for you but it needs a constant supervision, so you end up glued to the screen, fixing the results. I recall printing a long word with t9, and it followed me for 6 letters, but completely changed the word at the 7th letter to something else entirely, because it's dictionary didn't have my word in it, or it thought it's not as popular. Less control, more attention, frequent fuck ups. It's close in UX to what I personally getting now.