pre internet, your name, address, and phone number would published in the widely distributed telephone book.<p>if you were a big celebrity, you could get an "unlisted" number (I think you had to pay for it), but that was relatively rare.<p>you might recall, the opening of the original Terminator film (1984, same time period) hinges on this idea: the robot has a name and a city, he tears that page out of a phone book in a phone booth, and starts visiting the addresses one by one.<p>it's how we all lived (minus the killer robot), and it didn't seem strange at all. Women who lived alone frequently would have just their first initial instead of name, but that was not for fear of "stalkers", it was for fear of potential "heavy breathing" annoyance calls late at night.
>I read somewhere that Douglas Adams (writer of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) was the first person in Europe to own an Apple II computer.<p>Not the 1977 Apple II, but the 1984 Macintosh. Adams owned a variety of computers from the obscure DEC Rainbow, to the also-obscure Apricot, to the BBC Micro, but as far as I know he never owned an Apple II, but he was a fan of the Macintosh from the first time he saw it and even wrote in the "about the author" section of his books that he "lived with a lady barrister and an Apple Macintosh".
Looks like it were the real addresses, see <a href="https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1265/property-of-the-week-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams/" rel="nofollow">https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...</a>
In 1987, doxxing yourself was the norm. ~80% of the Usenet messages from the 1980s (to early the 1990s) had names, institutions, office addresses, and phone numbers attached to them too. Most were universities, governments, or corporate R&D addresses, but there were many small businesses and home users as well. Some phone numbers are probably still valid today. In fact, an Usenet archive (UTZoo) has already been taken down from the Internet Archive due to an alleged legal threat made by an individual (despite that this archive was indispensable if anyone wants to find any historical information from this era, and that it had been available online for the last ~20 years before it was taken down, with multiple copies still online). I suspect the legal status of these kinds of early online community archives will be increasingly problematic over time.
"...the chances of being picked up by another craft within those seconds are two to the power of two-hundred-and-sixty-seven-thousand, seven-hundred-and-nine to one against. Which, by a staggering coincidence, was also the telephone number of an Islington flat, where Arthur once went to a very good party and met a very nice girl, whom he entirely failed to get off with." -- The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams<p>This one was, on a similar note and by a not so staggering coincidence, the phone number of friends of Adams who didn't mind getting oddball phonecalls (if I remember the lore from Don't Panic accurately).
It was a different time. Let's not forget Douglas Adams himself doxxed a man in the earliest versions of The Hitchhikers's Guide for being the worst poet in the universe.
For what it’s worth, seems like it was indeed his address:<p><a href="https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1265/property-of-the-week-hitchhikers-guide-to-the-galaxy-author-douglas-adams/" rel="nofollow">https://www.housebeautiful.com/uk/lifestyle/property/news/a1...</a>
As a personal aside, I once had a scrap of paper with Douglas Adams' email address written in his own hand, which he gave me in the course of a brief conversation after a book signing.<p>Sadly, it was lost in a fire a few years later.
apparently his "new home" is on sale
<a href="https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/22-duncan-terrace-london-n1-8bs" rel="nofollow">https://themovemarket.com/tools/propertyprices/22-duncan-ter...</a>
For some reason I read this as Fredrick Douglas and thought maybe it was the undocumented parts of Fredrick’s life.<p>Disappointing, but otherwise a great read.