While adding some more updates to my Blog Software directory, it occurred to me that I might later have a mangement challenge keeping track of stuff that does not belong here, which reminds me of a funny story from yesteryear. In the 1970's I was active in the Cincinnati Computer Club, at a time when a lot of home computer users identified interesting Internet sites such as BBSs based on the phone number that went into your modem.
We'd circulate directories of phone numbers by category, published in newsletters, passed around on diskette, and some of those sites had directories of other sites that people tried to mine. Now at that point in time, the ability of end users to do cut and paste correctly was in its infancy, because the software just was not that good. So we would get strings of digits that were supposedly a phone number that someone had typed in wrong, or they dropped a leading or ending digit in a string, with a zero inserted by mistake that made the right number of digits.
Our club had a directory of several thousand numbers passed out to the officers and volunteers to check them out before we published them to the general membership. Quite a few were identified as wrong numbers (this number is for a real human being, not a computer connection), so we omitted them from our official directory. Then we would get people sending us in additions to our directory, that they got from other directories, that included those #s we had determined were wrong #s, so we started listing them immediately followed by Do Not Call - this is a Real Person, not a BBS. We also had a statement about the problem in our introductory text about how to use the overall directory.
Many members did not read the instructions, and were curious about the Do Not Call numbers, and called them out of curiosity, thinking perhaps we were saying not to call because something extremely naughty going on at those BBSs. So then we started getting some members calling us to say that they tried a Do Not Call number and think the officers ought to update the club directory because this is a Real Person, not a BBS, so we ended up having a separate Do Not Call list, which was used to clean suggested additions to the list, before we checked them out.
This was before ma bell had caller id. Unwanted phone calls was an epidemic compared to today, and the poor person whose number made it into these hundreds of directories of BBSs of which a large percentage were actually wrong #s (for calling BBSs) became afflicted with phone calls all day long from all over the country, in which the caller did not say anything, something like today's marketing which dials a cluster of phone #s, connects the phone vendor to the first person who answers, and records others that answer to try them again a little later.
2:31:28 AM 
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