Looking back at 1994, a major theme was the change in online pricing. It sort of snuck up on us, but by November and the DataTimes announcement, the trend was clear. Change was in the wind and connect time was dying, albeit a slow, reluctant death. Pricing online services and resources has been a problem ever since Roger Summit and Carlos Cuadra cooked up connect-time pricing in the early 1970s. Back then, connections were made at 300 baud using terminals with no downloading capability, and time spent connected to mainframe computers was a valid cost factor.
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