I was talking to a coworker about these new phishing attacks that send your name and address and sometimes a picture of your house, and I was saying how creepy it is, and they told me that phonebooks were delivered to everyone and used to have like literally everyone in a city listed by last name with their phone number and address. Is that for real?

    • @wallybeavis
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      532 months ago

      Mid 40s, and I too feel old now - at first I thought OP was setting us up for a joke. The local phone company still delivered phone books to everyone in my city until a few years ago.

      I think it was an old legal requirement for any phone company providing landline services to also provide phonebooks. Unfortunately most weren’t even recycled, they were either burned in backyard firepits, or just thrown out

        • @wallybeavis
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          132 months ago

          Rotary phones weren’t even that long ago?!??! I still remember the swooop, click-click-click-click sound, oh, and the ear shattering ringing bells. I am happy that in our lifetime we’ve come so far that kids don’t understand tools from just a couple decades ago. I remember my father showing me a stack of punch cards he used at work and warning me not to touch them - but what I also know is, that those kids better get the hell off my damn lawn!

          • I'm back on my BS 🤪
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            92 months ago

            Fun fact: You could dial without even using the rotary. In a morse-code-like fashion, quickly click the hang-up knob the number you want with a pause in-between numbers. So if you were calling 558-9151 (remember 7 digit numbers‽), you’d do (c = click):

            c-c-c-c-c

            c-c-c-c-c

            c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c

            c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c-c

            c

            c-c-c-c-c

            c

          • Andy
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            2 months ago

            I had one in my room! Such a good feel to it. Same with picking up and hanging up!

            This was in the early 2000s, btw. They were already relics, but landlines were still commonly used when I was in high school, and it had such a handsome look to it and felt great to use. I have long thought that a product that would do incredibly well would be a cell phone charging dock where you put your phone in and while it’s charging it just acts like a landline rotary phone. The user experience is very, very gratifying, and if you’ve ever tried to hold a call while your phone is plugged into the wall you know how much better a solid headset with a coil wire would feel than that.

        • @WoahWoahOP
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          32 months ago

          I would probably have similar difficulties… I can’t even tell what they were doing wrong and then suddenly doing right. I do know the basic motion because I’ve seen it in shows I think, like you spin it around… but I never really thought about how precisely you do that. And you only had a certain amount of time to dial it?? That’s crazy.

          I will say I would have figured out you need to pick it up first sooner. But even my office phone I dial the number, see it on the little screen, hit send, and then lift up the receiver if I don’t want to use speaker phone.

          • Andy
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            12 months ago

            They were starting by putting a finger in zero and then dragging to the number. And for zero they were dragging all the way to the stop.

            You’re supposed to dial by putting a finger in each number hole and then dragging to the stop. So they dialed zero correctly, but only zero.

            • @WoahWoahOP
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              12 months ago

              You’re supposed to dial by putting a finger in each number hole and then dragging to the stop. So they dialed zero correctly, but only zero.

              How do you do that with only five fingers?? I guess that makes sense that the was such little time to dial it. Like you put each finger in the holes and then spin the whole thing? How does it figure out which… wait, then how would you do repeated numbers? Or did numbers never repeat…? I’m confused.

              • MrsDoyle
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                32 months ago

                You dialled by putting a finger in each number hole one at a time, dragging each one to the stop. When I was a kid our town’s phone numbers had just four digits, didn’t take long to dial.

                • @WoahWoahOP
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                  12 months ago

                  Your number had what now?? Wow. Maybe you mean five? I was reading a Times article that they changed the four digit codes in 1930, but maybe that wasn’t standardized across the country. I’ve learned more about phone history than I ever expected to in my life. 🤣

                  • MrsDoyle
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                    22 months ago

                    I’m from New Zealand originally. Small town in a small country. The time zone joke back then was, “If it’s 5pm in Sydney, it’s 1956 in Auckland.”

              • @jqubed
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                22 months ago

                No, do it sequentially. To dial 515-2400 you put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 1, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 5, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 2, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 4, drag it to the stop, then release. Next put your finger in the 0, drag it to the stop, then release. Finally put your finger in the 0 again, drag it to the stop, then release.

                • @WoahWoahOP
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                  22 months ago

                  OMG. Why would they put a timer on it then?? That seems like it would take forever.

                  • @jqubed
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                    22 months ago

                    It did take forever. Rotary phones work by sending clicks down the phone line that automation equipment listens to. If clicks came too fast the equipment wouldn’t understand it correctly. This was one of the big improvements the touch tone phone brought: it was much faster to dial. Instead of clicks each button generated a tone at a specific frequency and the automated switching equipment could interpret it much faster. At least some of the early phones had a switch to make them send clicks instead, in case the local phone company didn’t support tones yet.

              • @Rhoeri
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                02 months ago

                You mean to say you’ve never even seen a move with someone using a rotary phone?

      • @WoahWoahOP
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        102 months ago

        No joke! I don’t know if I’ve ever actually seen a phone book. How would they even fit? Seems like they would have been enormous.

        I did see a payphone in a restaurant once but it didn’t work. I saw another one outside of a gas station on a road trip in the south. That one had a dial tone, but I think you had to pay more to call anyone we knew, so we just took selfies pretending to use it.

        • @brygphilomena
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          242 months ago

          Residential listings were “white pages” and businesses were “yellow pages.”

          Yes, they were big, printed on very thin paper, with small typeface.

          • @WoahWoahOP
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            2 months ago

            OMG 🤣🤣🤣

            Edit: is Hershey where they make the chocolate? Didn’t realize that was a town and not just a company. I’m learning so much today

            • @GildorInglorion
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              122 months ago

              Milton Hershey made chocolate, a town, and a school that inherited a controlling interest in the chocolate company.

                • @WoahWoahOP
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                  2 months ago

                  Wonka vibes intensify

                  Oh and a really good hospital too it looks like. Because he made chocolate shaped like a drop?? Dang

                  • @jqubed
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                    22 months ago

                    His real innovation was a less expensive method to produce milk chocolate (although this process seems to produce butyric acid which is an unpleasant taste in chocolate if you’re not used to it) and becoming the first mass-produced chocolate in the US. The Hershey Kiss was just one of many products he made.

              • @WoahWoahOP
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                22 months ago

                Looked it up, that school seems very cool. It does sound like you’re describing Willy Wonka though.

            • @Geekocracy
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              42 months ago

              You are going to think I made this up, but the street lights are shaped like Hershey kisses.

              • @WoahWoahOP
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                2 months ago

                Like in the town town or the amusement thing.

                Did this dude enslave small-statured orange people by chance?

                • @Geekocracy
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                  42 months ago

                  The town, or at least the main street that goes by the factory. As far as I know, no orange people were enslaved.
                  Seriously though, Milton Hershey was surprisingly progressive for his time. He built affordable homes for his workers and helped them become home owners. The school he built was originally for orphaned boys.

                  • Andy
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                    42 months ago

                    I’m from Pittsburgh. I think we ran a cross country meet in Hershey once.

                    The amusement park and factory tour are all quite charming. It’s hard to recommend one make a dedicated trip, but if anyone is ever on a road trip nearby, it’s worth the detour to stop by for a day.

                    Then again, my recommendation is 20 years old. It could be either better or worse now.

          • @Geekocracy
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            52 months ago

            Wow! I grew up with these. (Nostalgia intensifies!)

        • @wallybeavis
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          112 months ago

          Did the voice on the payphone say: You must please deposit 25 cents to place your call LOL I think that’s engrained in my memory

          Fun fact:
          Once touch tone phones became the norm there were actually games you could play by just calling a number. There was also a number you could call and get the local time and temperature. Oh, and lets not forget Mr. MoviePhone!

          • @WoahWoahOP
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            32 months ago

            I don’t remember a voice, but maybe! I just remember the tone because we were excited that it worked. Someone came out of the gas station and saw us taking pictures and stuff and they told us that it’s there because until recently (and even still) cell coverage was really bad or nonexistent in the area, so a lot of people still used landlines.

        • @[email protected]
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          72 months ago

          One use for a phone book was to prop a little kid in a regular chair so they could eat at the table. Like, after they outgrew a baby highchair and could balance on their own. Also you could prove your strength by ripping one in half.

          Listings were usually under the name of the adult male, for safety as well as sexism. A woman living alone would probably use just her initials for safety.

        • @[email protected]
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          2 months ago

          They were quite big, but used super thin paper and small font. There were books thicker still, but still the phrase “thick as a phone book” was used.

          There were also Yellow Pages (same format as phone books, but entirely yellow) which listed businesess and stuff.

          Pre-internet these were the household essentials.

          There was also a number you could call to ask for phone numbers or other stuff. Basically a call in google.

              • @WoahWoahOP
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                52 months ago

                I did that one on purpose as a joke! 😁

      • Altima NEO
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        42 months ago

        Yeah we were still getting them up to line 2010 or so, even though we haven’t had a land line active in my house since I moved in.

    • @Fosheze
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      142 months ago

      Not even 30 and I feel ancient right now.