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.