My parents bought the 1960 edition of Collier’s Encyclopedia when I was 1 year old. They also got a subscription to Collier’s Yearbook (as a form of annually updating the encyclopedia) from 1961 until… at least until I went away to college.
I pretty much read all of those volumes, and paid particular attention to the articles on linguistics. That’s pretty much how I first began to learn linguistics back in grade school.
Many cities had a Time/Date/Weather line that you could call to get the current time, date, and weather forecast.
A number of places and organizations set up pre-recorded phone banks so you could call in for advice on cooking, sex, relationships, etc… I remember seeing an ad for one of these places - you’d dial the number, enter the 5-digit code, and listen.
I, of course, listened to all the sex ones, which weren’t as titillating as I had expected. 
My parents were too cheap for encyclopedias at home, so I read those at school. They did, however, indulge me every year with the Guinness Book of World Records and several dictionaries.
Thankfully, by the time I had to do real research for classes the internet had been become popular.
Holy cow! I forgot about that. We would always have one in the house and bought a new one every couple of years. It would usually help in conversations that started, ‘What was the name of that movie with…’ or ‘who was in that, again?’
IMDB is invaluable for that now.
Most of the information I now look up on the internet (history, science) I would have gone to the library for. For math-type things, I would have to both go to the library and have someone look at my trials and errors (now you can just post your tribulations and have an answer in a jiffy).
For getting place, I relied on directions. If they were wrong, or you got lost, you were either completely screwed or stopped at the gas station.
Phone books were how you found phone numbers. For addresses, you typically had to find the phone number, call an actual person and get them to give you the address.
For medical information, you were very reliant on your doctor. Now, you can look up your illness or problem online and see what the general consensus is for treatment or look up meds to check for side effects, etc.
The internet has changed the way I live in so many ways for the better. I can’t imagine going back to a time when finding information wasn’t so easy.
Wow, how quaint. Our school library (junior high) had those books in the regular stacks, and you could check them out.
Side issue/question: what did you do about Urban Legends and the like?
Believed them.
Roger that! And passed them along!
I have all of Jan Brunvand’s urban legend books. Didn’t want to get caught napping! And lots of other reference books on topics that interested me (and still do). And of course all the Straight Dope books.
Also, I remember turning on the radio for “weather on the eights” to get the forecast. Now I just check Weatherbug on my phone.
In junior high and high school a paper would send me off to the Queens Central Library to look at the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature and the New York Times index. I’d also use the encyclopedia there (We had a World Book which wasn’t good for deep technical subjects) and of course books.
In grad school I used the department library, and, even better, the collected journals my adviser had. I still hoard hard copies of things. I have 32 years of the proceedings of our major conference, which goes back far beyond what is on-line.
As for directions, there were these things called maps which work quite well.
A long time ago (1975), in a different career I used to do ‘online’ database searches of medical literature by using a dial up portable terminal to connect to ‘Dialog Information Services’ - one of the early precursors to web searches.
Books. Lots of books. Mostly my own, sometimes at the library.
School library, or public library. But only for class papers and such, which was only every once in a while.
For more general, fleeting questions, I’d just have to ask around if my curiosity was strong enough. Otherwise i’d probably just shrug and move on. My dad did own a cheap set of encyclopedias which I’d refer to every so often, but they were limited for anything beyond the most common topics.
Now when I’m curious about something, I habitually go to the Internet or my iPhone to look it up. But if I’m in a situation without internet access, I do sort of find myself annoyed and cutoff.
Glad to see someone else remember the Reader’s Guide. I was a student library worker on the periodicals floor from 1978-1982 and taught thousands of students to use the Reader’s Guide. It seems so crazy now. To research something, you had to 1. figure out what term or terms to use (helping behavior vs. altruism, for example), then 2. look up this term in every year’s edition and copy down references, then 3. Go to the stacks and find the bound periodical containing that article. In my own searches, I would be happy with 5 or 10 articles in 3 to 4 hours of work. Now that takes .00009 seconds.
I have fond memories of pouring over piles of microfiche, growing up in a rural area they never kept periodicals for long and many were only available through inter library loan.
I remember sending requests to Bibliographical Center for Research, they would find materials for you.
The smell of thermal prints still reminds me of sitting at dunk’n donuts reading information printed from microfiche copies of journals and being amazed at the amount of information I had access to.
A big shout out to the librarians who made that all happen!
