Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Moll
The big advantage of the Phone Book Companion was that it gave not only the STD codes for the exchanges (listed in alphabetical order), but also provided a translation in the other direction (in numerical order), enabling a code to be identified back to a geographical area. In these days of calls with "spoofed" caller identities, I amuse myself by looking up the codes in these numbers to see whether they equate to real places.
The most recent edition I have of the PBC is the Millennium edition, published in October 1999. I've not come across anything more recent than this. The earliest edition I have (under the name The Code Decoder) was published at the end of 1989, but claims to be an updated and revised version of an earlier document.
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I didn't know something like this ever existed. In the days before the internet, knowing where a phone number was (nationally) was useful info when deciding whether or not to ring someone about something advertised in a small-ads column, where the seller omitted to tell you where they were.
I had some friends at university in '93 who wrote a specific kind of database from scratch (in Fortran 77!) to supply the place, if you supplied the STD code. I think it was a displacement activity from revising for finals, and they were at it for weeks and weeks
