It was earlier - the 1984 movie (Terminator) had the scene where he rips out the page from the phone book, looking for the Sarah Connors listed there. :)

K-anonymity in action. (The only thing you need to do is change your name to someone else's name.)

I believe the LGR channel has shown some DOS programs from before 1990 that had the entire catalogue of the US phonebook available in a neat DOS UI, where you just choose a location/state (or non at all) then enter a letter and it would filter every entry on the chosen filter...

(Name was ProPhone 1993, so not really pre 90's) https://youtu.be/yBupNdYe08g?t=1078

The ones in Australia where one way - you could search for a name and it would give you a phone and address... but if you a programmer, you could read the database directly, so search on a phone number and get back the address and name, or search an address and get back name and phone number.

There were a few services in the early 2000s doing this, they were called Reverse Grey Pages

I think we actually had that, bought on a whim by my Dad at a computer show in the 90's. We had some fun looking up how many people with certain first/last names were in the US, but didn't have much other use for it.

And funnily enough, family members of mine have started multiple businesses named A-1 something. :)

Do you know why they used A-1 rather then A+? I've always wondered, but never knew anyone to ask.

I don't know, but I'm also not entirely sure how phone books sorted back in the day (they predate ASCII by quite a bit), or if it was even consistent across locales (probably, at least before the baby bells), so for all I know A- sorted before A+, and nobody wants to be just A-.

I Denmark phone books had postal address. Think this goes for many contries i think. You could even call directory inquiry and ask for someone's address and they would give it to you.