Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987 | Hacker News Reader

Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987

not.withoutdistractions.com

100 pointsharryvederci97 comments

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.

Anyone could pay to have an unlisted number, it wasn’t crazy expensive in the US at least

My 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.

You weren't alone. After my parents divorced I lived with mom and she went back to her maiden name.

IIR it was $1.50 month for NY Tel in the mid 80s, about the same cost as a hamburger for this times.

haha was not aware "heavy breathing" calls were a thing

I'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)

The "somehow" part is most certainly all the spam/scam/robocalls that killed voice calls otherwise.

Prank 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 :)

They were a thing well into the early 2010s until people began doing increasingly cruel “pranks” for Youtube views and wound up going to prison.

A huge pop-culture example: The Simpsons with Bart and Moe going back and forth

I fondly remember conference-calling two Dominos numbers to each other and cracking up as they both said “hello dominos can I take your order” to each other. Ahh college.

I’m not saying who or when or whether this ever actually happened, but there were kids in my hometown who would do this but announce to each location “please hold for a call from the regional manager” or something equally officious, then put them on and say something ridiculous but plausible enough to get them going. Ahh a different time.

Allegedly

My mate was good at extending a conversation when someone dialled a wrong number, pretending he is the kid of whoever they called :)

Definitely a thing on the other side of the pond.

> "prank calls" basically no longer exist

https://www.tiktok.com/@putagirlon

> Yes I realize "heavy breathing" calls are more akin to sexual harassment

Really? I was quite sure we were ghosts or other monsters when we did it. Did adults do that to get off?

Just making sounds was the 'coward' way to do prank calls, anyways.

> 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.

> 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".

Still very much a thing in Norway

Also 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.

it's a thing in the UK too, just online: 192.com

In Norway, the phone book hasn't been published since 2012. What are you referring to?

The online version: https://www.gulesider.no/

That'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.

What 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

I don't think I'm splitting hairs here. The difference is that your name isn't in "gule sider", since it's a directory of businesses.

"Telefonkatalogen" was what other countries call "white pages", which is a directory of individuals.

The GP comment was indeed about the pre-Internet, but the whole point is that nobody publishes a big, widely distributed book with everyone's names in it anymore. You could literally get a book with every living adult in Norway listed. Sure, you have online services like 1881.no and gulesider.no that are the successors to this directory, but they're not at all the same thing.

> The difference is that your name isn't in "gule sider", since it's a directory of businesses.

I must be missing something; I can find pretty much every person I know in Norway in there by looking up their name (unless they have explicitly opted out).

Taking 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.

> 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.

There 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.

My experience was people having little notebooks, made-for-purpose, usually called address books, where you had everyone alphabetical by last name.

That 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

Some phones had a slot where you could insert made to fit cards with common numbers.

Some had custom numbers that could be dialed by pressing the “mem” key followed by a number key. There would be a little slip of paper which you would write in “1: Grandma, 2: Dad work…”. Simpler times.

This is called "speed dial" and it's still a standard feature on desk phones.

You know, in the year 2000, we'll all be on speed dial.

https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=seinfeld_08_20_145&timestamp=0...

Even in the early 2000s, when I dropped my landline, my parents (born in the 1930s) were aghast. "How will people get in contact with you? You won't be in the phone book!"

The only reason we still have a landline is because of my elderly parents. My dad complained at me the other day because my mobile number is always changing (it has been the same for 26 years).

I didn’t finally talk my parents into dropping their landline until 3 months ago.

Had an aunt who wanted to be reachable but only by her friends in the know. She confided to me in the late 70s if I needed her she was listed under J.P. Sartre.

It was a common thing for physicians to do to avoid having patients pester them in their time off. I believe it was a $20 charge, but can’t remember if it was per year or month.

> It almost seems like extortion

The instincts you have about privacy today are inappropriate for back then. It's hard to get to your mind around the difference sending an email, or making a phone call, or sending an SMS to anyone in the world being nearly free makes.

Back then in most countries even a local phone call cost a couple of dollars in today's money. Interstate and international phone calls had background 30 second beeps to remind you dollars were being poured down the phone line.

The effect of spam is obvious - there wasn't any. But you probably aren't thinking about the other end of the scale - what was an upcoming phone call worth to you? The answer to that is almost unimaginable in today's world - receiving a random international phone call is almost certainly worth the interruption many times over. That meant having your name, address and phone number published in a directory was definitely worth it. It was worth it to the phone company too, of course, because it increased the usage their network. So they provided the listing for free. It was a win, win for everyone.

To get a feel for how much it's changed consider the yellow pages. Businesses paid huge sums to the phone companies to get their phone numbers listed in other places in addition to the free one. The value of every phone call they got made it worth the money. Now I struggle to get to find the the phone numbers of many companies. It seems they go out of their way to hide it. That's the difference the price of a phone call feeling to zero makes.

That part about trying to find a phone number, rings so true. (!) Have a Normal question? Go to a supplier website, scroll around, find tabs, find a go to contacts form, fill in form, etc. But all I want is a quick question. Sometimes, even as simple as, what town is this company in?

Also 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.

Pre 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.

Not 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.

There 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.)

Oh 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.

Back 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.

Ok 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?

The 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.

Indeed. 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!

It'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.

> 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.

> 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.

It wasn't a weird distinction at all back then. One was a real-world threat. The other was a nuisance that likely didn't care where you lived. One was rare. The other was fairly common.

> 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.

Yes, 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/?s... (with bonus lovely exchange names!)

> 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) telephone book White Pages.

I grew up in Ontario in the 90s, and addresses were in the phonebook.

You were spared the killer robot?

People 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

> 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.

>I read somewhere that Douglas Adams (writer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) was the first person in Europe to own an Apple II computer.

Not the 1977 Apple II, but the 1984 Macintosh. Adams owned a variety of computers from the obscure DEC Rainbow, to the also-obscure Apricot, to the BBC Micro, but as far as I know he never owned an Apple II, but he was a fan of the Macintosh from the first time he saw it and even wrote in the "about the author" section of his books that he "lived with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh".

IIRC, he wrote some of his books on a PowerBook.

And it's been 30 years since I read them, but I think I recall lots of mentions of Macintosh (IIs in particular, I think?) in the Dirk Gently series.

For those of you that might be interested, the Rainbow was an attempt by DEC to make an IBM-compatible AND a CP/M compatible in one box - it was a very nice box, and made a great VT200 terminal, but the compatibility was just not there.

The Apricot was another attempt at an IBM PC compatible, this time from a UK company. It was awful. You could not fit an Ethernet card into it without using an expansion box, much like the RAM pack on a Sinclair ZX81, and with similar reliability.

The Apricot PC [1] was not an IBM PC compatible, it was a Victor 9000/Sirius 1 compatible.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apricot_PC

Yes, it was one of those MS-DOS machines that wasn't a full IBM compatible -- another one briefly popular in the US and Japan was the Sanyo MBC-550 (or "Silver Box"). The idea was that people would write software that just used the MS-DOS API (the way they did for CP/M machines). But unfortunately they didn't -- most software assumed that it was running on an IBM PC so machines that didn't convincingly appear to be IBM PCs failed.

We (at the BBC) had the later 286 versions which claimed compatibility, and could run Windows 2.0 - they were still crap, and in fact so unreliable that we trashed them all and replaced them with Compaq, as doing so was so much cheaper in support, development and other costs.

Original reason for buying them was of course because they were "British". This was in the late 1980s - luckily things have changed since.

If Douglas Adams owned the Apricot before the Macintosh then it would have been an 8086+8089 one, they were reliable. His writing suggested that he only used Macs after getting the first one.

"The new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to 16 entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors." -- Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, 1987

The Macintosh Plus was introduced in January 1986.

Stephen Fry is one source of the story.

> I like to claim that I bought the second Macintosh computer ever sold in Europe in that January, 30 years ago. My friend and hero Douglas Adams was in the queue ahead of me. For all I know someone somewhere had bought one ten minutes earlier, but these were the first two that the only shop selling them in London had in stock on the 24th January 1984, so I’m sticking to my story.

1. https://www.stephenfry.com/2014/01/mac-at-30/

Looks like it were the real addresses, see https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...

Haha awesome, thanks for looking it up!

Phone number looks right too. Correct format for London at the time and apparently 01-359 was the Canonbury telephone exchange, which is almost certainly the closest to Duncan Terrace!

Looks like a different address close by - on a street parallel to upper street.

Listed as the “new address” in the screenshot…

In 1987, doxxing yourself was the norm. ~80% of the Usenet messages from the 1980s (to early the 1990s) had names, institutions, office addresses, and phone numbers attached to them too. Most were universities, governments, or corporate R&D addresses, but there were many small businesses and home users as well. Some phone numbers are probably still valid today. In fact, an Usenet archive (UTZoo) has already been taken down from the Internet Archive due to an alleged legal threat made by an individual (despite that this archive was indispensable if anyone wants to find any historical information from this era, and that it had been available online for the last ~20 years before it was taken down, with multiple copies still online). I suspect the legal status of these kinds of early online community archives will be increasingly problematic over time.

BBSes usually required your name, home address, and phone number as part of signing up for an account. I never gave it much thought when entering my information nor later when collecting it from others when I was a SysOp. Once in a while when driving around I might see a street sign and think "Oh, that's where Frisbee_Guy lives" if I recognized it but never considered using it for anything nefarious. Also remember computer magazines of the time often had sections where people would get their problems published along with an address for anyone wanting to contact them about it. Sometimes even a phone number.

Magazines used to have pen pal sections where kids would post their name, age, and address so anyone could write them. It was a different time.

"...the chances of being picked up by another craft within those seconds are two to the power of two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand, seven-hundred-and-nine to one against. Which, by a staggering coincidence, was also the telephone number of an Islington flat, where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl, whom he entirely failed to get off with." -- The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

This one was, on a similar note and by a not so staggering coincidence, the phone number of friends of Adams who didn't mind getting oddball phonecalls (if I remember the lore from Don't Panic accurately).

I used to live nearby. Was always amused by the Hotblack Desiato estate agent signs.

I still live nearby and am similarly amused. 22 Duncan Terrace is an especially nice house, in an area not short of nice houses. Clearly Adams had done pretty well from Hitchhikers and his other work by the 80s.

Iain M Banks also lived in Islington in the 80s and much of his novel Walking on Glass is set in and around the place, and include some references to Adams living there.

> But first, let’s address the elephant in the room: yes, there is a character in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy named Hotblack Desiato. Yes, they are named after us. No, we didn’t just pull this name out of thin air, it’s actually the last names of our two founders.

-- https://hotblackdesiato.co.uk/about-us/

It was a different time. Let's not forget Douglas Adams himself doxxed a man in the earliest versions of The Hitchhikers's Guide for being the worst poet in the universe.

For what it’s worth, seems like it was indeed his address:

https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...

It's also the address Companies House gives for him when he was a Director of his business:

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

("doxxing" directors, particularly in the UK, is pretty straight forward.)

As a personal aside, I once had a scrap of paper with Douglas Adams' email address written in his own hand, which he gave me in the course of a brief conversation after a book signing.

Sadly, it was lost in a fire a few years later.

I read "Bill Watterson" instead of "Bill Atkinson", and for a brief moment, the story in my head was pretty wild.

I misread two names. Bill Waterson doxxing Scott Adams. Because they're both comic strip authors, I suppose.

But reading TFA and seeing hypercard set me straight.

apparently his "new home" is on sale https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/22-duncan-ter...

It's not called doxxing if it was a mistake. Doing is doing it to put people in danger.

doxing, the act of exposing private or identifying information on the Internet about an individual or group without the person’s or group’s consent, usually with malicious intent.

Everyone knows his number anyways.... 424242424242....

For some reason I read this as Fredrick Douglas and thought maybe it was the undocumented parts of Fredrick’s life.

Disappointing, but otherwise a great read.

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