#3: The Phone Book

Who remembers the Yellow Pages? That giant catalog held all the information you could possibly need about your community, neighbors, and local businesses. Look, kids. We know it’s baffling to imagine a world without Google Maps and Yelp, but such a world did exist. The Yellow Pages served as the analog version of a web search.

Every house had a phone book at one point in time. The tiny print, the thin pages, and the smell of the Yellow Pages ink are all visceral memories for many of us. How many hours were spent looking through the phone book, imagining the lives of all the people listed inside? This was a common pastime if you were a kid in the 80s or 90s.