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July 2000 is I guess a pre-Google world...so how would "Call 411 and ask for the number of main naval base in Bethesda, MD" work? Just curious how the operator
by op03 7y ago
July 2000 is I guess a pre-Google world...so how would "Call 411 and ask for the number of main naval base in Bethesda, MD" work? Just curious how the operator did these lookups?
- bradford 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoUnless I'm remembering wrong, 411 only gave directory assistance for your area code. To get the phone number for a naval base in another state, he would need to dial that area code plus 555-1212 to contact the local directory assistance for that location. Might be wrong though. Where I grew up there was a charge for using directory assistance so my parent prohibited us from ever using it instead of the phone book.
- Aloha 7y agoby 2000, you could get national DA by calling 411.
- Hnrobert42 7y agoHaha. I remember phone charges for stuff like that. *69 to see who called you was 50 cents. So many nickel and dime charges. Of course, back then, monthly phone bills weren’t equal to a healthy percentage of a car payment.
- svenfaw 7y agoAlmost everybody was already using Google by late 1999.
- klodolph 7y agoThat date is off, it was somewhere in the 2002-2004 range. Back in 1999 I think Yahoo! was the most popular, or maybe AOL’s search engine.
- wil421 7y agoNo they weren’t yet, you still had Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Ask Jeeves and many others. Yahoo was probably the dominate one. Most households used AOL who just purchased MapQuest. The dot com bubble killed the competition.
- Hnrobert42 7y agoI remember my dad telling me about google and me telling him metacrawler.com FTW. This is the same guy who showed me the WWW on a lynx browser, and I scoffed that FTP was where it’s at.
- jedimastert 7y agoIt's something that couldn't easily be faked at the time.