Even if you want to publish a phone number, you can get a voip number for under $1/mo from many providers these days and redirect it as needed, block numbers, send to voicemail, etc. Complete control over it and complete separation. It may have made sense at one point but today it seems crazy.
You're being downvoted because the parent clearly isn't talking about present day, but is talking about writing shareware probably in the 80s or 90s. Not much useful/cheap VoIP going on back then.
I assume you're raking in downvotes because the context was pretty clearly why someone would have at some point in the past published a personal phone number long before the services you describe were available. Clearly, most people wouldn't do so today.
32k? Loooxury! We had to bang magnetic rocks together fast enough in order to induce a current on the phone line and we only got 1200 baud and WE LIKED IT.
Seriously, 32k in the days of shareware? I think the fastest modem I ever saw (in that era, anyway) was 19.2k, and almost nobody had those. Pretty sure I went from 19.2 straight to ADSL.
Yeah, but very latterly. Modems topped out at about 56K (although, in my experience, they rarely connected at that speed). That's the fastest I had before getting broadband in the late 90s.
Before that I had 9600 (maybe something else in between), although as I recall there were competing "standards" in the 9600 space.
I started off with a 36k and then a 56k modem and remember shareware being significantly involved in my early uses of it (also napster). I think the problem is that, for us, we arrived in the age of shareware via said modems so that was normal to us ... and then those on here older than us started enough earlier that our entire experience was the tail end of theirs when it already "wasn't like it used to be" for them.
Shareware was originally very much part of BBS culture (or at least hobbyist PC culture) and was largely set against expensive retail box software that mostly let you, at best, try out limited demo versions.
As the Internet/Web and open source merged into the PC world from the Unix world--and it became easier to legitimately trial retail software--shareware largely morphed into just another category of retail software that was sold online.
