One of the great unsung heroes and forgotten aspects of the BBS world of the 80's and 90's. PC Pursuit was basically a service offering use of Sprint's packet network and multi-city modem banks to connect to BBSes from around the country for a much lower rate than calling those BBSes directly.

Written to me by Artiken:

"Doing PCP all night can be legal. ;-)"

"A couple of years after I got my Comodore 64 I was living in Eureka, California. Aprox. 1986.

"Being in a remote location, BBS's were scarce. There were some IBM, and C-64 BBS's. A friend read in a magazine for a service where you could dial in ATDT to a local number, type in a code to transfer your call to another city, then ATDT a phone number like it was a local call. This service was called PCPursuit offered by an unknown, in my neck of the woods, company called Sprint.

"The fee was $30.00/month. For this 30 dollars you could use this long distance transfer system for 30 hours a month, during off peak times. 6pm till 7am. Peak was a steap $14.00/hour. Off peak was at $7.50/hour. I would use this to call BBS's in NY. I also found out that I could dial long distance numbers. So I would call out from NY to Canada. The long distance charges from NY to Canada were cheaper than if I called directly from my home in California to Canada. With PCP there were no international charges. These extra long distance charges were added to my PCP bill.

"I would end up not calling out for several days during the month. So near the end of the month I would make up for my not calling and pull an all nighter. The next day at work I would look like I had done PCP all night. (drug reference intentional)