You're a year older than me, so I don't know if this is a regional thing or not but, when my family first got cable in the early nineties, "basic cable" was whatever channels you could get over rabbit ears + Headline News. That was it; everything else was considered extra. It was called "basic cable" because it existed for the benefit of people who, for whatever reason (range/signal quality/etc.), were unable to receive local channels via over-the-air antenna.