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Comment by wwwwewwww | Hacker News Reader

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.

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-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.

Here 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-N...

Well given the phone book was a list of names, addresses, _and numbers_ you could, in fact, do reverse lookups.

The point is it was ordered by name, not by number. So you can't jump to an arbitrary number.

There was, you could buy a disc that contained the book and do a search.

In some countries you could call a number to do it.

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