Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987(not.withoutdistractions.com) |
Bill Atkinson doxxed Douglas Adams in 1987(not.withoutdistractions.com) |
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 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.
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.
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.
I remember as a teen being very irritated that people could no longer find me in the phone 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.
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.)
Both sides of every such silly observation changed, not just one.
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.
See, for instance, https://www.loc.gov/resource/usteledirec.usteledirec08135/?s... (with bonus lovely exchange names!)
I'm pretty sure addresses were listed US West (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_West) telephone book White Pages.
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.
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.
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.
And even then, the "pause" function on the majority of domestic VCRs would invariably obscure the interesting parts of the frame with "noise bars".
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)
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.
That's a weird distinction you're attempting to make.
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".
> 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.
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 Macintosh Plus was introduced in January 1986.
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).
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.
https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...
("doxxing" directors, particularly in the UK, is pretty straight forward.)
Sadly, it was lost in a fire a few years later.
But reading TFA and seeing hypercard set me straight.
Disappointing, but otherwise a great read.
It was an entirely different time indeed!
Original reason for buying them was of course because they were "British". This was in the late 1980s - luckily things have changed since.
1881.no also exists for "white pages", but it's useless because most people with mobile phones are not in the database.
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
Allegedly
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.
"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.
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).
https://amphetamem.es/meme?id=seinfeld_08_20_145×tamp=0...