Use of "ahoy" before "hello"

The word hello seems to have become popular with the coming of the telephone. Did our ancestors greet each other with ahoy before that?

Hello, with that spelling, was used in publications as early as 1833. People in the 1830's said hello to attract attention

Hello, what do you think you're doing?

or to express surprise

Hello, what have we here?

Hello didn't become "hi" until the telephone arrived.

Ahoy has been around longer — at least 100 years longer — than hello. It was a nautical greeting, derived from the Dutch "hoi," meaning "hello." Alexander Graham Bell (inventor of the telephone) felt so strongly about "ahoy" he used it in answering his telephone (except for the first time, when he expressed surprise with Hello!) for the rest of his life.

So does "Monty" Burns of the Simpsons. Mr. Burns regularly answers his phone with, Ahoy-hoy, a coinage properly used to greet or get the attention of small sloop-rigged coasting ship.

Hello became very popular when the first phone books (thanks to Thomas Edison) officially sanctioned "Hello" as the greeting upon answering the phone. (They also, in Way To End A Phone Conversation, recommended: "That is all.")

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hello is an alteration of hallo, hollo, which came from Old High German halâ, holâ, emphatic imperative of halôn, holôn to fetch, used especially in hailing a ferryman. From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)

And the good south wind still blew behind,
But no sweet bird did follow,
Nor any day for food or play
Came to the mariners' hollo

Bill Bryson (Mother Tongue) says that "hello" comes from Old English hál béo þu ("Hale be thou", or "whole be thou", meaning a wish for good health).