Yellow pages as a database

Nice short article from Reason.com, an excerpt,

By 1954, the American phone system was producing and distributing about 60 million phone books a year. For all their impressive physical heft, they still signaled the coming shift from an industrial economy to an information-based one. While they cataloged a vast material world of carpet cleaners, typewriter repair shops, and smokestack painters, they also suggested that their world--the world of manufacturing and distributing data--was the rising paradigm.

Like the Man says, Read the whole Thing,
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