[wwwwewwww]

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.

[lb1lf]

-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.

[mmcgaha]

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...

[Jestar342]

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

[dbbk]

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

[Triv888]

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

[bonzini]

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