Whoever thought June was just about graduations and weddings owes an apology to Alexander Graham Bell.

A native of Scotland, Bell gets credit for inventing the telephone in 1875. Although others intrigued by the notion of converting sound wave vibrations to electrical currents and reconverting them to identical sound waves at the other end of a circuit were close behind, Bell got to the patent office first in 1876.

So what makes June so special for Mr. Bell, who died in 1922? Well, June is the month AT&T starts plopping “The Real Yellow Pages” on our doorsteps, lawns, or in the mail rooms of apartment and condominium complexes. In rural areas, they toss those orange bags containing directories at the foot of mailboxes up and down the highways and byways. Mr. Bell didn't invent the phone book, but without the telephone there wouldn't be a need for phonebooks.

Which got me wondering, who uses a phonebook in the Internet age?

It turns out a lot of people do.

AT&T annually publishes more than 1,250 different directories in 21 states. They make seven primary directories in Connecticut, plus an additional 12 local books, like the Norwich and Mystic directories that augment the primaries. Last year, AT&T handed out 5.9 million phonebooks in Connecticut, which is amazing, considering the state's population is about 3.5 million.

And according to AT&T, its customers reference all those alphabetical listings of names followed by numbers about 3.3 billion times annually. And those are just land lines. Imagine if phone companies included cell phone numbers in directories? They're not ready to do that yet.

They are, however, making directories available through computers and wireless devices with yellowpages.com and more sophisticated searches that not only locate a name and number, but also send maps and directions. And of course all those other competitors are printing their directories and online phone lists.

So phonebooks, like everything else, are morphing to the Internet age. They're just not moving as quickly as I would have expected. Users and advertisers are still making good use of them. And providers like AT&T continue to publish and distribute them - which in Connecticut means continuation of a service born here.

The first telephone directory of the first public telephone company anywhere in the world was printed in New Haven in January 1878 for the former New Haven District Telephone Company, which changed its name to Southern New England Telephone Co. by 1882.

One of two known surviving copies of that initial list of 50 “subscribers” is on display at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut.

Southern New England Telephone provided phone service in the state until 1998, when SBC Communications purchased it. AT&T is now the owner.

Communications have drastically changed in the 133 years since Bell invented the telephone. But they haven't changed so much that you no longer need a phone directory.