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Sure, but my point is that mitigating the higher difficulty of finding the answer (as compared to "search the internet"), the possibilities were fewer too. "Wha

Sure, but my point is that mitigating the higher difficulty of finding the answer (as compared to "search the internet"), the possibilities were fewer too. "What had she read recently? Check her library records, magazine subscriptions and viewing habits. Did she spend time in a doctor's waiting room?" Not many more possibilities outside of those. One of your respondents said that finding the answer would have been "almost impossible". On the contrary, it might have been as easy as calling a research librarian with a time range and the relatively small list of possible resources she would have had access to, e.g. "Cosmopolitan, Psychology Today, Reader's Digest, Stephen King's The Stand, W Magazine and The Springfield Local Tattler"

wpietri 4y ago
Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give you article topics, but would not do much to help find articles that might have long strings of random numbers. So what we're talking about is paging through thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages of paper and/or microfiche looking to see if those random numbers appear somewhere.
- rendall 4y ago
  The numbers IIRC were in a journal. Presumably the possible dates of the entry are pretty circumscribed.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    He said both notebook and journal, but the page was undated, so who knows. Some people are pretty chaotic. Plus periodicals can indefinitely hang around in whole or in part, so a search that would give you some confidence could still be quite extensive.

wpietri 4y ago

Having been in the 1980s a person who has taken calls like that at a library, I think you are vastly underestimating the difficulty of finding things without search engines. E.g., my dad had subscribed to the Grand Rapids Press for something like 40 years when he died. That's 14600 individual issues that would need to be searched, not counting the many magazines he subscribed to at different times. Indexes would give you article topics, but would not do much to help find articles that might have long strings of random numbers. So what we're talking about is paging through thousands to hundreds of thousands of pages of paper and/or microfiche looking to see if those random numbers appear somewhere.

rendall 4y ago
The numbers IIRC were in a journal. Presumably the possible dates of the entry are pretty circumscribed.
- wpietri 4y ago
  He said both notebook and journal, but the page was undated, so who knows. Some people are pretty chaotic. Plus periodicals can indefinitely hang around in whole or in part, so a search that would give you some confidence could still be quite extensive.