pager, aka beeper... how did they work?

[Cataract]

Pagers are still in use... I just was at a client's plant and he had to run to a meeting and told me I could page him. He forgot to give me the number, but I did see his pager. Still looks the exact same as 10 years ago.

No one mentioned that pagers had a vibrate function as well as the beep. Pagers vibrated before cells phones did.

 

[NoNotAgain]

Pagers are still in use... I just was at a client's plant and he had to run to a meeting and told me I could page him. He forgot to give me the number, but I did see his pager. Still looks the exact same as 10 years ago.

No one mentioned that pagers had a vibrate function as well as the beep. Pagers vibrated before cells phones did.

Here's a commercial from the hay days of pagers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMBBbMN0Nl8

 

[Mike 208]

Some restaurants are using pagers to alert customers that their table is ready (usually these a large disks, so people don't take them home).
There were at least two companies that I know of that came up with a code sheet (similar to police radio codes), where you can send messages like what to pick up at the store on the way home from work, or to ask someone out on a date, etc.

 

[Bogie]

Yeah, the voice pagers we used worked all over town.

We got some old Motorola voice pagers with 2-tone squelch (you've heard similar tones if you've seen the 70's television drama "Emergency!" ) We had them set up to open the squelch via 2-tone over our amateur radio repeater in case of severe weather. This was around 1996 and was old school even then.

Still plenty in use I carry one every day its how my VFD still notifies us of calls.