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 se

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.