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pre internet, your name, address, and phone number would published in the widely distributed telephone book. if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unl
by fsckboy 2y ago
pre internet, your name, address, and phone number would published in the widely distributed telephone book.
if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unlisted" number (I think you had to pay for it), but that was relatively rare.
you might recall, the opening of the original Terminator film (1984, same time period) hinges on this idea: the robot has a name and a city, he tears that page out of a phone book in a phone booth, and starts visiting the addresses one by one.
it's how we all lived (minus the killer robot), and it didn't seem strange at all. Women who lived alone frequently would have just their first initial instead of name, but that was not for fear of "stalkers", it was for fear of potential "heavy breathing" annoyance calls late at night.
- jockm 2y agoAnyone could pay to have an unlisted number, it wasn’t crazy expensive in the US at least
- donatj 2y agoMy mom worked in corrections and after an incident with one of her coworkers getting attacked at home, we got an unlisted number. I remember as a teen being very irritated that people could no longer find me in the phone book.
- cgriswald 2y agoYou weren't alone. After my parents divorced I lived with mom and she went back to her maiden name.
- anjel 2y agoIIR it was $1.50 month for NY Tel in the mid 80s, about the same cost as a hamburger for this times.
- ldjkfkdsjnv 2y agohaha was not aware "heavy breathing" calls were a thing
- nervousvarun 2y agoI'm an old and your comment made me realize "prank calls" basically no longer exist. This was an enormous cultural phenomenon that existed for decades (at least in America) and somewhat quietly has completely died off. For anyone who might know, were prank calls as much of thing in 50s-90s Europe? Asia? Honestly don't know but it was sortof ever-present in the background of American teenage life (it was pretty likely you either were pranked or pranked someone else at some point in your adolescent life). (Yes I realize "heavy breathing" calls are more akin to sexual harassment and on the extreme end of the "prank call" spectrum)
- varjag 2y agoThe "somehow" part is most certainly all the spam/scam/robocalls that killed voice calls otherwise.
- mikeyinternews 2y agoPrank calling was definitely still alive and strong in the 90s. At least they were we me and my friends. And not the "heavy breathing" kind, just silliness. In middle school I spliced a phone cord so my friend and I could prank from the same room. When we got 3-way calling, we would be able to prank with each other from afar AND we could each call another (unsuspecting) party and get them on a you-called-me call together. Good times :)
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- aaron695 2y ago> if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unlisted" number Or like a teacher? There was nothing uncommon about being unlisted. The phonebook was your only one way searchable link to the outside world. It was LinkedIn and Facebook all in that one line in a physical book. So most people had it. There was no way with a phonebook to reverse search using an address to know what the phone number and persons name was. Data could not flow. It was the dark ages. So people had to talk to people. It was an awful place pre-internet, just like early internet and mid internet society, but it'd be nice to get some of the good parts back. As for this "doxxing" (Which the article uses jokingly), there was no way for this info to spread anymore than Douglas Adams friends telling you his address. You couldn't even rewatch the program unless you got lucky and recorded it.
- lozf 2y ago> You couldn't even rewatch the program unless you got lucky and recorded it. And even then, the "pause" function on the majority of domestic VCRs would invariably obscure the interesting parts of the frame with "noise bars".
- spinningarrow 2y agoStill very much a thing in Norway
- renhanxue 2y agoAlso in Sweden. Most people, almost everyone, have their phone numbers and addresses listed in publicly searchable databases. Everyone's taxable income is public too (accessing it online costs a nominal fee from an aggregator service). It's fine, it's not really abused that much. You can request a protected identity from the authorities if you really do have stalkers but it's a bureaucratic hassle. Mainly since everything in this society relies on anyone wanting to do business with you to be able to look your existence up using your personal number.
- permo-w 2y agoit's a thing in the UK too, just online: 192.com
- atombender 2y agoIn Norway, the phone book hasn't been published since 2012. What are you referring to?
- spinningarrow 2y agoThe online version: https://www.gulesider.no/ https://www.gulesider.no/
- atombender 2y agoThat's the yellow pages, not the phone book. And also not an actual book. 1881.no also exists for "white pages", but it's useless because most people with mobile phones are not in the database.
- spinningarrow 2y agoWhat is the practical difference? I was responding to the reference in GP’s comment that “…your name, address, and phone number would published…” which is the case with gulesider. Their comment was about pre-internet, mine was referring to the post-internet version. Apologies if there was confusion. Additionally, the Wikipedia page on ‘Telephone directory’ [0] states: > A telephone directory, commonly called a telephone book, telephone address book, phonebook, or the white and yellow pages [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_directory
- Rodeoclash 2y agoTaking this on a tangent, but an awesome easter egg in that scene is the Terminators other finger is pointing to an entry for "John Connor" in the same phone book.
- gregmac 2y ago> if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unlisted" number (I think you had to pay for it), but that was relatively rare. Anyone could do it. It almost seems like extortion: "pay us $$ or we'll publish your name, address and number in a huge book that we'll deliver to everyone in the city!" I guess you probably agree when you get a phone line hooked up, though.
- ricardobeat 2y agoThere was literally no other way to get in contact with anyone, other than ringing their doorbell if you already knew where they lived, or asking around. Getting unlisted was unusual, and for most, would defeat the point of having a phone in the first place. At least where I was from, early 90s, exchanging contacts was not something people did casually either, only for business or love (email/ICQ changed this when they appeared). I had a handful of numbers memorized, but would use the phonebook even for extended family. You’d have their number highlighted or earmarked in the phonebook instead of keeping your own.
- cool_dude85 2y agoMy experience was people having little notebooks, made-for-purpose, usually called address books, where you had everyone alphabetical by last name.
- refulgentis 2y agoThat reminds me of how things I considered mandatory previously (carrying small notebook + pen). They weren't mandatory, and most people won't do the manual thing. Don't get me wrong, you'd keep important addresses, say, your grandma out of town. And of course, professionally. But by and large, people just expected you to be in the phone book and vice versa. It also meant calling someone you knew without explicitly being given their number wasn't a faux pas. Now that I think about it, a lot of things were easier. Sigh
- damiankennedy 2y agoSome phones had a slot where you could insert made to fit cards with common numbers.
- Loughla 2y agoAlso a lot of places had city directories that were printed and sent out like phone books that included name, address, phone number, birthday, place of work, family connections, and children's birthdays as well.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoPre internet, the entire world could not access that phone book effortlessly, nor F with your life effortlessly and by remote control and without even being detected. Both sides of every such silly observation changed, not just one.
- vidarh 2y agoNot mess with your life so easily, but even being in Europe, I knew I could call 411 in the US to get information at least a decade before the first time I visited and actually used it.
- EvanAnderson 2y agoThere were "reverse" directories published by non-telco publishers indexed by telephone number and/or street address. Those were a lot more difficult to get your hands on. When I was a kid I remember thinking about how cool it would have been to somehow scan the entire telephone book and have that data indexed differently. (I also thought it would make wardialing s ton easier since you could knock out all the known-residential numbers.)
- mbirth 2y agoOh god, yes, I remember we’ve got D-Info (German/“D”eutsches phone book) which had that feature. And because the phone books were copyrighted by the phone company’s publisher, the creators of that app hired cheap workers to manually read the phone books and type everything into a database. Similar to clean room design in software development.
- anjel 2y agoBack in the day, you had to pay to get an unlisted number but you could get a listed number listed in another name at no added cost.
- Forgeties79 2y agoOk but it’s still a jerk move that none of us would want to experience, right? Like can we at least agree it was malicious and unwanted?
- adsteel_ 2y agoThe author says he scrolled past it quickly, so it "may have been an honest mistake," ie not malicious. Unwanted? There's been a big cultural shift over the past 100 years about addresses. Papers used to print subjects' addresses alongside the subject. In the 80s addresses were still considered public knowledge via phone books. So maybe Douglas Adams didn't want his to be public, but he would have been in the minority. Either way, there's no evidence (here, anyway) that he gave it a second thought.
- EricE 2y agoIndeed. Heck even VCRs were rare back then - how many people happened to record that and then thought to go back frame by frame to pick the address up? It was an entirely different time indeed!
- Forgeties79 2y agoIt's less this specific act and more that just because you could easily locate numbers/addresses it doesn't really lessen the act of blasting it out for the world - nobody wants to be on the receiving end of that. Clearly it was an accident for this specific case, but I just found the previous comment way too flippant/hand wavy.
- foobar1962 2y ago> pre internet, your name, address, and phone number would published in the widely distributed telephone book This is used as a plot point in Steve Martin's movie "The Jerk". The titular character proudly sees their name and number in a phone book; the scene changes to a crazed gunman randomly choosing their next victim from a phone book and landing on the same name and number. Hilarity ensues.
- justin66 2y ago> not for fear of "stalkers", it was for fear of potential "heavy breathing" annoyance calls late at night. That's a weird distinction you're attempting to make.
- happyopossum 2y ago> pre internet, your name, address, and phone number would published in the widely distributed telephone book Not sure where you’re from, but at least in the countries where I’ve lived (Canada and the US) your address was not in the phone book. It was a book of phone numbers - nothing more.
- joelwilliamson 2y agoI grew up in Ontario in the 90s, and addresses were in the phonebook.
- drfuchs 2y agoYes, in the US, Bell Telephone White Pages absolutely showed your house address by default. How else would you know which John A. Smith was the one you were trying to look up? By the 1980's I recall being able to pay to remove your address from your listing (or pay even more to remove your listing entirely, as noted elsewhere). The excuse that Bell Telephone gave, by the way, for charging these fees is that you were decreasing the net worth of the network by not being listed. See, for instance, https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec08135/?sp=10&st=image https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec08135/?s... (with bonus lovely exchange names!)
- tivert 2y ago> Not sure where you’re from, but at least in the countries where I’ve lived (Canada and the US) your address was not in the phone book. It was a book of phone numbers - nothing more. I'm pretty sure addresses were listed US West (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_West https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_West) telephone book White Pages.
- macjohnmcc 2y agoYou were spared the killer robot?
- kussenverboten 2y agoPeople had a "little black book" with phone numbers of romantic interests. club and bar bathrooms had phone numbers etched into the stalls. Songs about fake phone numbers ruled the day like 867-5309/Jenny
- to11mtm 2y ago> if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unlisted" number (I think you had to pay for it), but that was relatively rare. Ehh, in my hometown, police officers almost always opted for unlisted, at the same time one couldn't blame them given the overall level of crime in the city.