Comment by ssl-3

Sure. But we usually didn't need it: We kept the phone numbers for our friends, family, and our favorite pizza place memorized.

And if the phone rang, it was answered. It was almost certainly a real person calling; spam calls were infrequent to the point of almost never happening.

It was a different time, and it is lost to us now.

(We do still have public name-to-address databases, though. For instance: In my state of Ohio, that part of a person's voter registration is public information that anybody can access. Everyone is still effectively doxxed and it's still not a security issue.)