I believe he was wrong back then. While in 1982 individuals with 800 numbers may have been very rare, I believe they existed. It was just the cost meant few other than businesses had them.
Yeah, we run the “Classic Columns” without updating them … beyond an occasional edit here or there.
On the one hand, that’s annoying, since readers expect Cecil’s Word to be The Way It Is. On the other hand, we don’t have the staff to update the older columns, and Cecil’s not interested in doing so since he doesn’t get paid for it.
I would imagine that the “trunk mileage” charges referred to in the article (and the difficulty of finding particular numbers free) might together explain the use of ‘half-phonetic’ numbers like 572-GROW for a plant food store. :] You can pick an exchange that’s close by and that happens to have the last four digits free.
Another nitpick. 800 numbers aren’t a buncha bux. I don’t know about 1982, but in 1986 we got one for support for an internal software tool, and it was fairly cheap. I was working for AT&T at the time, but we didn’t get a break, and we didn’t get many calls. Wonder what the definition of buncha bux was anyhow?
The actual name of the service is (or was) “Inward WATS” (WATS standing for Wide-Area Telephone Service). Regular WATS makes all calls within a certain area (which could be the whole country) local calls – pay a big lump sum and then don’t worry about your long-distance bill. Inward WATS was perceived as the reverse.