July 2000 is I guess a pre-Google world...so how would "Call 411 and ask for the number of main naval base in Bethesda, MD" work? Just curious how the operator did these lookups?
Unless I'm remembering wrong, 411 only gave directory assistance for your area code. To get the phone number for a naval base in another state, he would need to dial that area code plus 555-1212 to contact the local directory assistance for that location. Might be wrong though. Where I grew up there was a charge for using directory assistance so my parent prohibited us from ever using it instead of the phone book.
by 2000, you could get national DA by calling 411.
Haha. I remember phone charges for stuff like that. *69 to see who called you was 50 cents. So many nickel and dime charges. Of course, back then, monthly phone bills weren’t equal to a healthy percentage of a car payment.
It's something that couldn't easily be faked at the time.
Almost everybody was already using Google by late 1999.
That date is off, it was somewhere in the 2002-2004 range. Back in 1999 I think Yahoo! was the most popular, or maybe AOL’s search engine.
No they weren’t yet, you still had Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Ask Jeeves and many others. Yahoo was probably the dominate one. Most households used AOL who just purchased MapQuest.
The dot com bubble killed the competition.
I remember my dad telling me about google and me telling him metacrawler.com FTW. This is the same guy who showed me the WWW on a lynx browser, and I scoffed that FTP was where it’s at.