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?
I hated how these were delivered to you whether you wanted them or not. So much junk.
They made really great fires though if you tore each page out, crumpled them up and stuffed them between the logs.
Also interesting, I took one about an inch or so thick and shot it point blank with a 12 gauge shotgun and tiny yellow circular confetti came out, which was neat to see.
Mid 30s and I feel ancient right now.
Not even 30 and I feel ancient right now.
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
You want to feel really old?
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 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.
Man rotary phones were the best! Such a joy to dial.
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.
Residential listings were “white pages” and businesses were “yellow pages.”
Yes, they were big, printed on very thin paper, with small typeface.
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
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!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.
The 1900s were crazy
Man, I was already feeling ancient. You using “1900s” didn’t help much :D
I did that one on purpose as a joke! 😁
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.
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.
I have never felt so old.
Name, address, and phone number of the account holder used to be published in books that got sent to everyone in the city and also just left lying in boxes that had phones in them if you needed to make a call while you weren’t home, because your phone used to be tied to a physical location.
You also used to have to pay extra to make calls to places far away because it used more phone circuits. And by “far away” I mean roughly 50 miles.It’s not the biggest thing in the world, privacy wise, since a surprising amount of information is considered public.
If you know an address, it’s pretty much trivial to find the owners name, basic layout of the house, home value, previous owners, utility bill information, tax payments, and so on. I looked up my information and was able to pretty easily get the records for my house, showing I pay my bills on time, when I got my air conditioner replaced and who the contractor who did it was.As an example, here’s the property record for a parking structure owned by the state of Michigan. I chose a public building accessible by anyone and owned by a government to avoid randomly doxing someone, but it’s really as easy as searching for public records for some county or city and you’ll find something pretty fast.
I use one of those services, Optery in my case. Do you think that’s just a waste of money (honest question)? It definitely reduced my footprint for simple googling, but I’ve been wondering if it’s really worth the cost.
Generally, yeah. Your initials and family name - of the account payer only. First line of your address. I think the Terminator film, amongst others, shows this being used to locate someone.
In a public phone booth, accessible to everyone. Later then, you had the chance to opt out of the phone book “service”, here in Geemany that was around the time alternative phone providers appeared. Now seems to be default, so you got to watch to whom you give your number.
Geemany, is that where the cricket got his name?
Actually in most places it was however the person wished to be listed and often included full first names and sometimes middle initials. Or could sometimes be a couple like “John and Mary Doe”
You could opt out of being listed, but anyone who did that was considered a weirdo hermit. Why would you not want someone to be able to call you?
Oh God, it feels so weird saying it nowadays.
And didn’t you have to pay to not be listed?
You did, at least eventually. This could be argued to be a very early, not to mention analog, form of enshittification.
Phone books had your name and phone number. Some had your street address too.
Before that, there were books that even had your occupation.Random directory example from 1886:
Last name, first name, occupation, street name, number.1790…
<waves at likely a fellow genealogist!> :)
Heck, there was even overlap with the internet where you could briefly lookup anyone in any city’s white pages listing online for free! People used to sign their Usenet posts with their full name, phone, and mailing address, though. We were really stupid in hindsight, but it was a more innocent time.
Yes. I live in a larger metropolitan area and there were both white and yellow (business) page editions that were 2 1/2 inches thick each.
I’m amazed they were even that thin. It seems like they’d have to be huge.
Very small font on very thin paper.
Yeah it felt like the Bible and the white/yellow pages used the thinnest paper I’d ever seen
