Stumbled on a 1998 site about the history of public payphones in Chicago while looking for a hardware store.

I was trying to find a local place that sold specific brass fittings and ended up on a personal website from the late 90s, which claimed there were over 30,000 payphones in the city at their peak. I found this by clicking through old links from a city archive page, not through any search suggestions. Does anyone else have a go-to method for finding these kinds of forgotten corners of the web?

2 comments

2 Comments

mason2092mo ago

Classic internet. You go looking for a pipe fitting and end up getting a degree in payphone history. I just start clicking on anything that looks old and hope for the best.

wesleyw461mo ago

Yeah but mason209, is it really a degree or just a bunch of random facts you'll forget by next week? I fall down those holes too but let's be real, most of it is just trivia that doesn't stick. The internet makes you feel like you're learning something deep when you're really just skimming the surface of some weird topic. It's fun, but calling it a degree is giving it way too much credit.