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You were an extreme outlier if you bothered to memorize dozens of ten digit phone numbers in the era before everyone had a cellphone. The average person doesn'
by adventured 5y ago
You were an extreme outlier if you bothered to memorize dozens of ten digit phone numbers in the era before everyone had a cellphone.
The average person doesn't even have ten good friends, much less a need to memorize dozens of phone numbers. They would buy address books / contact books to write down dozens of numbers, not memorize numbers they very rarely use.
- dylan604 5y agoOr even more niche in your outlier status if you could remember IPs of the commonly used servers without a DNS in place. Most of the time, local networked IPs all start with the same values for the first 3 octets (maybe 2 if VLAN but then usually only one digit diff). The same was true for most people's local phone number memorized registry. Those of us old enough, we only had to dial 5 digits using (70s) the last number of the prefix before eventually moving to 7 digits to include the full prefix (80s). The world suddenly changed when we had to dial the entire area code as well (90s).
- karaterobot 5y agoI think "dozens" is an overstatement, but 10-20 wasn't unusual. In college, I could have given you the number for a dozen delivery restaurants, easily. Not proud of it, just saying. That's not counting family, friends, services like taxi companies and movie theaters, and work.
- vel0city 5y agoHow many different area codes did those dozen delivery restaurants and taxi companies have? How many different exchanges? Was each one a unique area code, each a unique exchange? If not, then you're not really remembering unique 10 digit numbers. There's going to be a lot of repeated numbers in there.