Posts like this remind me what an amazing phenomenon Internet is. 20 years ago a question like this would have been left unanswered. I hope we get to protect and keep Internet for generations to come.
Surely either it was luck that a person with this knowledge read the question, or an extremely large number of people read the question?
This approach generalizes to strings as well. In my field of computer networking, you're an easy search away from finding out what 0x0800 means with very little context.
Searches can also work for numbers that don't look familiar. For example, you'd immediate recognize the first few digits of π, but you might not so easily recognize π²≈9.86960440109.
Maybe, but she also would not have had access herself to the internet, and so a series of numbers like this would have been related to a book in the house or local library or at worst a TV show that others would have seen, and therefore much easier to find.
It's not like the internet wasn't alive and well 20 years ago. Hell, Stack Exchange is little more than Usenet, and that was in use over 40 years ago.
Sometimes I think whether someone makes profitable use of the internet is the real social division these days.