Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!netsys!vector!telecom-gateway From: bywater!scifi!njs@uunet.uu.net (Nicholas J. Simicich) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Yes! Directory Assistance via Modem Message-ID: Date: 29 Mar 89 04:29:45 GMT Sender: news@vector.UUCP Reply-To: njs@scifi.UUCP (Nicholas J. Simicich) Lines: 33 Approved: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@vector.uucp X-TELECOM-Digest: volume 9, issue 113, message 8 of 8 In article dts@cloud9.stratus.com (Daniel Senie) writes: (.....) >A year or two ago NYNEX announced plans to distribute the white pages on >CD-ROM. They claimed to get all NYNEX market telephone listings on a single >disc. While this information would not necessarily be indexed by phone number, >building such an index is not difficult. >So, a person or company with CPID interfaced to a PC or minicomputer could >display the caller's name and address while the phone is still ringing. (.....) Yep. I've seen it running at a Long Island communication show last year. It allowed you to do lookups by region and name, or by phone number. It would probably take a ring or two to do a lookup. Licensing policies didn't allow you to make wholesale copies of the directory, or use it as a basis for sales calls. The AT+T people claimed that they had put "ringers" (as it were) into the database, and that if they found a correlation between cold calls arriving at those numbers and people who were getting this service, they would cut off subscriptions. They weren't telling you the format of the database, although figuring it out and using it on a LAN as a server didn't violate their license, according to the person I talked to, as long as you didn't copy data from the database wholesale. They also claimed that someone had done it. You got a new CD-ROM every month, as an update. I seem to remember a number of around $10,000/year for the service, plus the setup (AT class machine and CD ROM drive, supplied by NYNEX). As NYNEX sold it, this was for a single station.