You could do that with net2phone using the internet in 1996. Skype doing it 7 years later wasn’t that amazing.
Thankfully, we are beyond long distance phone calls (mostly). In the 80’s we did something a little different: traded lists of long distance phone codes and made free calls that way.
No I am not confusing it. When microsoft got it they made it much worse, as they centralized all calls, were before it was p2p after the call was made.
But prior to that, when it first started to go from skype to skype was free and it was ok. To go from skype to landline cost money. But there were plenty of other services that did that for free. I suppose it was just because we were computer savy at the time so skype didn’t seem like a big deal.
They did do a lot of things right though. Encryption, conference calling, and a lot of devices support.
Anyways, you know who made skype? The same people who brought us Kazaa.