Before you could look up addresses on the internet, how did people find smaller locations like houses and restaurants?

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I know atlases and roadmaps were a lot more common, but from my understanding those give more of a broader view of a large area like major roads and stuff. If you needed to find a small subdivision or small road, how would you do that before the internet?

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27 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

For a business, you’d use the yellow pages, or call them and ask. For a residence, you ask for directions on the phone.

Anonymous 0 Comments

I used a thing called the “Thomas Guide”. You could buy them for different regions. All maps were on a grid, and so if you needed the smaller section you found it on the grid and say it was at volume D and row 5, you’d look up what page the D5 map was on and that be a whole page map of just that area.

So basically, maps. Also people were much better at giving and writing down directions. That’s about it!

Anonymous 0 Comments

I lived during the time
You looked the place up in the phone book and called for directions.
I have a pretty decent sense of direction and at work they would often ask me to come to the phone and ” tell this person how to get here”

Anonymous 0 Comments

You’d either ask the person who lives there for directions, call the business and ask for directions, or you’d find a city map. There used to be racks in all of the gas stations in my town with maps of most of the nearby cities in addition to the state, the county, etc. You don’t see those so much anymore because digital maps and/or in-car GPS navigation are more ubiquitous.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Of course, there are also city maps which show every single street, often even with (some) house numbers. And with a list of all the streets in the city, alphabetically sorted, that told you which of the map’s numbered squares to look for the street in.

Anonymous 0 Comments

ELI5: I remember relying on my parents and when I got older I realized it was directions given by word of mouth. We would either remember the directions, find it for ourselves and get lost in the process or we would just write the directions down from the person giving them. Dark times but you didn’t forget how to get there ever again once you got to the destination. I remember my grandparents kept books of road maps in the pockets behind the seats. Very fun to look through.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Stop at a phone booth to look up the address in the phone book. Then reference that to a map book people usually kept in their vehicles. Or if you heard of the place from someone else they would give you specific directions where to turn of the street name wasn’t a well known one.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Businesses: The White/Yellow Pages.

Houses: You asked a person for directions to their house and wrote them down on a piece of paper.

Anonymous 0 Comments

City maps were pretty commonly available. And most cities are organized so that streets are split between those with names and those with numbers. So maybe north/south streets are called 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. East/west streets have names like Main, Rood, White, etc. if you want to find 740 Rood Street you know it is on Rood between 7th and 8th Street.

Anonymous 0 Comments

When I was temping in the mid 90s as a college student, every time I got a new assignment the agency would give me specific directions, which I would write down.

If I had to be somewhere new and no one had given me directions, I would break out the big atlas-style map of the city and find the road in the index, go to the proper page, and look for the grid numbers (like Battleship).

When Mapquest first showed up, it was groundbreaking stuff. You would just print your Mapquest directions before any trip and you’d be good to go. If you didn’t have a printer, you just copied them by hand.

I hate having to look at a phone when I’m driving now, because listening to directions on Google or Waze doesn’t help me much. I have to look at how the road name is spelled to find the correct sign.

Car GPS units were my favorite. But now my car GPS is shit compared to Google or Waze.