The first telephone directory was issued on this date 137 years ago in New Haven, Connecticut. Distributed on February 21, 1878, it was a single sheet of cardboard listing 50 technologically savvy businesses in New Haven that had telephones (which had only been patented two years earlier). There were no numbers, since early telephone users simply told the operator who they wanted a connection to. At this stage, just knowing who had a phone was useful information.

Today, we take access to phone listings for granted. We can Google any business we need to contact, and our friends’ numbers are typed in once, stored, and never thought of again (until we have to replace phones). But for years, the lowly telephone directory was the workhorse of our connected world. White pages for personal listings, yellow pages for service providers, and if your community was lucky enough to have one, a reverse directory for attaching numbers to names…these were the engines that fueled countless economic and informational exchanges. (Yes, calling your friends after school to find out what’s up qualifies as an exchange of information.)

That’s all changed, of course. France had online phone listings as early as 1981 (for all six people who had internet access back then), and the U.S. started seeing listings migrate to cyberspace in 1996. The old phone book has become an outdated relic, and a wasteful one at that. (Greener cities like Seattle and San Francisco have tried to ban their unsolicited distribution.) But the death of the Yellow Pages is just a shift in format. The idea behind online listings is the same as it was in New Haven in 1878…your phone is useless unless you know who it connects you to.

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