4 ms·
> I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book only once when I was little. This just seems weird to me. Contacts books were replaced in a very limit
by bonaldi 10y ago
> I'm 35 and I have probably seen an actual contact book only once when I was little.
This just seems weird to me. Contacts books were replaced in a very limited way by PDAs for early adopters, but it wasn't until smartphones and their easy address books that they really started to die off. So post-2008, really.
Were you not in professional settings until your late 20s? Still be surprised if you are both 35 and genuinely unaware of what an address book is.
- jshevek 10y agoNot the parent, but I agree with them: Many tech savvy people abandoned contact books decades ago. Contact books serve two needs - long term storage and quick reference to frequently used numbers. Computers have provided the long term storage, and various other facilities provided the quick reference, even before smart phones: human memory, print outs, sticky notes, pdas, basic cell phones. In the 90s I knew people who'd set their browser homepage to a 'quick reference info' page on their server which included frequently needed numbers. The only tech savvy people I've known to use contact books in the last twenty years seemed a bit eccentric to me.
- tjl 10y agoMy parents had a contact book when I was little (back in the 80s), but they eventually went to a system of cards standing up in a tray separated by last letter. It made it easy to pull it out when you wanted to make a call. They now have a mixed system where their most used phone numbers are in their iPhone contacts, but they have still have that tray for everybody else. I had a contacts section in my DayTimer back in the 90s, but I've used a contacts program ever since I switched to using a computer-based calendar.