Hmm I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, here in the UK there is no way to tell whether a number is a VoIP number or a physical land-line. Is that not the case where you are?
This was very normal. With one of our first Internet connections, our ISP gave us 20mb or so of webspace but no way to have a dB so you would just host raw html.
Ofcom basically washed their hands of informing people about this, so no-one knew about it anyway. When the analog TV switch off happened, there were adverts everywhere but not for this even though I would argue this is an exceptionally bigger deal
The things that got me through it were Learn Python The Hard Way and having a project I was aiming to build. I was working at a jazz bar at the time and I wanted to build a membership and seating plan system for them. Needless to say it was terrible and we never got to using it but it gave me a really good goal with real-life problems to solve.
Assful? Asssome ?