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I'm sure not everyone knows this, because there are are people on this site who have not grown up with phone books. The article talks about a reverse phone boo
by wwwwewwww 6y ago
I'm sure not everyone knows this, because there are are people on this site who have not grown up with phone books.
The article talks about a reverse phone book: according to the author, given a phone number, you are able to look up name (and profile picture). To my understanding there were no reverse-lookup phone books like that back in the day.
- Jestar342 6y agoWell given the phone book was a list of names, addresses, _and numbers_ you could, in fact, do reverse lookups.
- dbbk 6y agoThe point is it was ordered by name, not by number. So you can't jump to an arbitrary number.
- Triv888 6y agoThere was, you could buy a disc that contained the book and do a search.
- bonzini 6y agoIn some countries you could call a number to do it.
- lb1lf 6y ago-In the good old days (sixties, presumably also earlier) police forces in at least some countries had phone books sorted both by address and by number. (Source - flea market find, a Norwegian book on the state of the art in criminology, published c. 1965) Edit: Oh, I just remembered that locally, the athletic union published a phone book with all subscribers in the municipality listed by number. This was c.1990 - after call ID was an option if you bought a decoder (or was an ISDN subscriber), before Internet phone directories were a thing.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mmcgaha 6y agoHere is an example on ebay of a book that has an index by phone number and even an index by street address. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Phonebook-1987-LAS-CRUCES-New-Mexico-Phone-Book-POLKS/324436628690 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Phonebook-1987-LAS-CRUCES-N...