This just isn’t true. Ever heard of the Haines Directory?
I used it at a summer job in the late 80’s. You could order reverse lookup books for anywhere you wanted, and of course could get that data electronically too. You could also call information for anywhere you could think of by dialing the area code plus 555-1212.
Never heard of it, but how much did it cost? How much did the reverse lookups cost? And even if you could get it electronically there was no way practical way to do much with them.
With the twitter leak millions of phone numbers/names are available for free instantly, and the technology to do some harm with them is readily available.
I used it at a summer job in the late 80’s. You could order reverse lookup books for anywhere you wanted, and of course could get that data electronically too. You could also call information for anywhere you could think of by dialing the area code plus 555-1212.