Tech Legacy - The Pager aka 'Beeper' (Part 17)

I had one of these! Does that make me a dinosaur?? It wasn't easy to keep in touch with friends back in the day. No smartphones, cellphones, social media... Can you even imagine??

Pagers were commonly used from the seventies to the nineties, when widespread adoption of cell phones rendered them obsolete for mass market use. They are still used by emergency responders as they are not subject to network outages or similar disruptions in communication.

A pager (also known as a beeper) is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknowledge, reply to, and originate messages using an internal transmitter.[1]

Pagers operate as part of a paging system which includes one or more fixed transmitters (or in the case of response pagers and two-way pagers, one or more base stations), as well as a number of pagers carried by mobile users. These systems can range from a restaurant system with a single low-power transmitter, to a nationwide system with thousands of high-power base stations.

Not just for drug dealers, this device helped people co-ordinate activities / meetings and jam sessions. This device was the beginning of a movement, a human obsession with interconnectedness!

Can you imagine having one of these hanging from your belt day in and day out?

So what would you do when you were on the go and your friend paged you?

It is simple... Find a payphone!

This is almost comical to think of in this day and age but having a pager was cool! I remember getting one and being so happy to have this new and exciting ability. Talking to a girl and want to impress her? Give her your pager number!

Oh how far we have come?!

Source:

Wiki