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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

Cool article! And, as the eternal nitpicker, I only found one inaccuracy:

> Back then, everyone had a landline, but people in the public eye kept their phone numbers out of the Yellow Pages.

The Yellow Pages were for company/business numbers, the phonebook (or part of the phonebook) with the personal phone numbers was plain white. Makes me feel old (and wonder how young the author is). Or is "keeping your number out of the Yellow Pages" a commonly-used expression I'm not familiar with?

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Random fact about the Yellow Pages:

Sun Microsystems developed a directory service now called "Network Information Services" (or NIS), however it was originally called "Yellow Pages".

They obviously didn't realise that the "Yellow Pages" were already a thing, so they renamed. All of their commands still begin with yp (ypbind, ypcat and others from what memory serves)

Just thought it was interesting. Also source[0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Information_Service

> They obviously didn't realise that the "Yellow Pages" were already a thing

I always thought it was called that way on purpose.

Yellow pages were ubiquitous, unlikely they were unknown to those at Sun.

Yes. If you grew up before the web took off, you knew all about the Yellow Pages. Every year, a. White Pages (direct listing, split between residential and commercial) and a Yellow Pages (business ads by category) landed on your doorstep. In the larger cities, these could be quite hefty.

> They obviously didn't realise that the "Yellow Pages" were already a thing,

If true, then why pick the name "Yellow Pages" at all?

Of course they knew what it was named after.

Back then everyone knew about the white pages and yellow pages. You used them all the time. It would be basically impossible not to know about them.

> They obviously didn't realise that the "Yellow Pages" were already a thing

This is almost certainly not true. More likely legal decided they could get into IP trouble, or marketing decided they didn't want the association.

If I recall correctly, the yellow pages was a hip way to refer to the entire telephone book, because it had yellow pages in it, and most other books did not have any yellow pages.

the phone book had 2 parts: the white pages, the front part, which was everyone, by default, and the yellow pages (the 2nd part), which cost money to put your business name in (with more money, you got a large ad with graphics)...you could pay $1 to keep your name out of the white pages...

Depending on where you lived, the white and yellow pages might be separate books or combined together. In big cities, they also made good impromptu booster chairs. I still receive a combined yellow and white pages each year but it's about the size of an old Reader's Digest now.

You are correct on both counts "Yellow Pages" was a registered trademark used in many countries for business phone numbers. Phone books also had literal yellow pages with business phone numbers and advertisements in them. It was also a colloquial term, at least where I am from (Midwest, USA) used to refer to the entire phone book.

It's funny how these weird pieces of knowledge stick even with almost zero exposure. Every time I got a phone book or yellow pages dropped on my doorstep in some flimsy transparent bag, I'd throw it directly into the recycle.

You are correct. Here in the US we had the White Pages for individuals. The Yellow Pages were for businesses only. Both were massive tomes and roughly the same size.

https://www.peoplefinders.com/assets/img/header/headterms/pr...

Yeah, this caught my eye as well. Anyone who grew up getting these enormous tomes on their doorstep knows that the white pages were for looking up girls you liked, and the yellow pages were for pizza.

In the UK it was called "ex-directory" I guess short for excluded from Directory. In the 90's British Telecom, the defacto telecomes provider in the UK, introduced a dialup service called Phone Base. Cant find anything about it online except this reference (https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/bt-phone-base), but it was possible to dial up, put in wildcard generic strings, select a dialling code and download massive tables of names, addresses & phone numbers.

Natwest around the same time also had a dialup system, where you could do banking transactions over a dialup modem. It worked on the pretense you knew the account numbers you wanted to shift money to, its main security was the bank transfers were done offline, then their app, a frontend for a DUN terminal, uploaded the batch of bank transfers and then logged off within 30seconds or something like that. Now it was possible to access the Natwest system without using their frontend app on Win95, and just dial in and make the transfers yourself, your only constraint was the time limit and having a password to access the system in the first place. Security wasnt their strong point from what I could tell.

Same in Sweden, the Yellow Pages were the business part of the phone book. I wonder how this international alignment happened or if it's just the natural way of coloring phone books.

In Netherland they were separate books. The phone book came from the phone company and just listed all non-secret phone numbers. The "Gouden Gids" (it did have yellow pages) was from a separate organisation and listed all businesses in the area.

In Canada at least, when I was a kid The Yellow Pages was the colloquial name for the entire book; yellow, green, white and all.

In the 90's in Toronto I always knew it as the White Pages.

It’s an interesting discussion. I’m fairly certain that the yellow pages only referred to commercial listings in the US, but I don’t recall anyone saying "check the white pages" for a residential number in the states, so maybe it was a colloquial misnomer.

Also Canada, "yellow pages" referred specifically to the business directory and not the rest of the phone book. "White pages" was the residential. And, wait for it, "phone book" was used generically or to refer to the whole thing. YMMV.

Yeah, in my family no one ever made a distinction. You'd look someone up in the yellow pages, they were all in the same stack, and only a prig would correct you, "you mean, look him up in the White Pages".

In the US, we said "the phone book" to be generic. The specific books were always specific.

As in "Did you look him up in the phone book?" which might be answered "I couldn't find him in the White Pages, but the phone's probably in his mom's name and I think she has a different last name, so that might be why. I think she has a business but I don't even know what industry so the Yellow Pages don't help here."

I guess I'm too young, but I always feel a little weirded out that yellow pages just had everyone name and number, publicly available to everyone.

That's... not very private?

When Terminator wanted to find Sarah Connor, he just went to the phonebook and found her. (Well, all the other Sarah Connors, anyway.) Nowadays, he would need to get into Facebook HQ first!

I suspect you're being downvoted because you call it the yellow pages but the yellow pages were where businesses were listed by category (eg Dry Cleaners or Orthodontists). Individuals and businesses were listed alphabetically by name in the white pages, so the terminator looked Sarah Connors up in the white pages not the yellow pages.

> but I always feel a little weirded out that yellow pages just had everyone name and number, p

That was the white pages, not the yellow pages (which were paid advertisements).

White pages had name and number for every customer, typically you were in there unless you opted to have an unlisted phone (and paid an extra fee for that, most likely).

The thing to think about is this is pre-internet technology for finding how to contact someone. There were reverse listing books too but not generally available (given a number, who owned it).

These pages go back to pure analog telephone systems (no caller ID, no call-back, no voicemail, nothing). Oh, and in some places it was common to share a number between multiple houses (party line).

The interesting bit is that this even translated to other languages. In Germany the "Gelbe Seiten" (literally yellow pages) was the commercial listings and the "Telefonbuch" (telephone book) was for normal numbers.

I wonder if this is related, specifically the origin and use of the term in the 1890s - it somewhat connects as to why yellow paper was used for advertising, perhaps? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

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