Thanks to the smartphone age, dialing “0” and “411” mean nothing on AT&T’s digital service

Want to Feel Older? Tell your grandchildren (or children if you’re young) that you used to have telephones that were wired into wall jacks. Tell them that you can’t keep your phone in your pants pocket and can’t take it with you wherever you go. And you might as well tell them that these phones had no screens and (horror of horrors) no TikTok! And if you need to get someone’s phone number, you can’t Google it or scroll through your contact list.

AT&T ends 411 service for its digital phone service

But this was not the case 100 years ago when the telephone operator was the person who connected calls, and passed on information. Josh Lauer, an associate professor of media studies at the University of New Hampshire, said, “The operator was the Internet before there was the Internet. There’s a wonderful cyclicality.” During the 20th century, AT&T provided callers with information such as sports scores, weather forecasts, time and date, election results, and bus schedules. Doesn’t it sound like Google?

“Information” was renamed “Directory Help” in 1968.

In her 2019 book about the history of telephone operators, Emma Goodman said of operators, “telephone users interpreted them as an efficient way to find out any information.” In those days, operators were asked the question of how to get a squirrel out of a house. In 1968, AT&T changed the name of the service from “Information” to “Directory Help”.

In a 1968 advertisement for AT&T, the company explained why it made the name change: “When it was called ‘Information,’ people kept calling it for the wrong reasons. Now we call it ‘Directory Help,’ In hopes that you’ll only call her for numbers you can’t find in the phone book.” In the 1970s, the number of operators in the system reached 420,000. By 2021, this figure had dropped to less than 4,000.

David McGarty, president of US Directory Assistance, says calls to operators have declined between 3% and 90% annually since they began in 1996. “We’re content to ride the Titanic,” says McGarty.