> back in the day one had to pay for every call, sometimes at per-minute rates: always so for long distance, and in some areas even for local calls.

Where and when did you pay per-minute for local calls? Everywhere I lived and traveled within the US back in the day, so to speak, local calls were always unlimited, even in rural areas.

In the Chicago area you had options ranging from fully-metered to unlimited throughout the metro area. In the 1990s, as more people got online, the unlimited plans went away, and the best you got was that calls within eight miles were flat-rate but pay-per-call.