I was rummaging my old Amiga hard disk for a little talk I’m giving in Hamburg two weeks from now when I found this gem – a GUI mockup of a phone cost estimation tool I was designing, apparently:

Telekom was the only phone landline provider at the time (a spin-off of the national German postal service), and this mockup shows the fresh new tariffs introduced in 1996. For dialling up our long-distance mailbox contacts (more than 200 kilometers away), “Mondscheintarif” was the only sensible option – moonshine tariff. I remember staring at the clock impatiently, waiting for 9 PM when calls would only cost 0.36 DM every 60 seconds. I also remember seeing the sun rising outside, in horror, because the moonshine tarrif would end again at 5 AM.

A quick ten minute call of lurking and downloading maybe one 880 KB disk image would set you back by 3 € in today’s value!

The numbers in the GUI are only placeholders – it probably wasn’t 31:32 o’clock, and the 31st of December 1996 was a Tuesday, not a Wednesday/Mittwoch…

So, the nostalgia is double-edged. I sure don’t miss the pricey phone tariffs, but without having to wait for the moon to shine, I might not have had the time to doodle this little mockup in the first place. :)

Edit: It seems I mixed up the call rates and misread the cardboard dial.

At the dawn of 1996, there was already a Nachttarif (night tariff, listed in the mockup). That one was even cheaper than moonshine tariff! Also, while the initial call cost you 0.12 DM, that 0.12 DM lasted for somewhere between 36 and 240 seconds, not necessarily 60 seconds. Of course, that all depended on the distance, the the time of day, and whether it was Saturday, Sunday, or a holiday. Now I’m beginning to see the need for a call rate utility…

If I dug up the correct diagrams, a ten-minute long-distance moonshine tariff call would cost you 2 € in today’s money on any day including Saturday and Sunday, and 1.70 € on holidays. Nachttarif: 0.50 €, but that rate was only available from Monday through Friday – and in the days “between the years”, from December 27th to 30th. Regular holidays wouldn’t have any Nachttarif at all, because, um, obviously.