As a late 2000s kid I always see pagers in TV, how do you setup and use one and how do they work?
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There were two main types of pagers: numeric and alphanumeric.
The numeric ones worked a bit like voicemail. Someone would call it, hear my recorded greeting, and then they could either leave a voicemail or dial their phone number. If they left a voicemail, I would receive a page with my own pager number. I then call the number and listen to the voicemail. If they dialed their number, I would receive a page with their number. I wouldn’t know what they wanted, (no accompanying message) but I could call them back without checking my voicemail first.
They could also receive email in a sense – but just displayed a blank page when an email was sent to them. There was no way to read the mail. At my first sysadmin job I used this as a notification for me to go check the server logs for whatever problem was happening. The email address was obscure so no one else had it, so any blank page meant it was a server that needed assistance.
Alphanumeric pagers were more expensive, but displayed actual text messages. They were invented before Speech-To-Text, so an actual human operator listened to voicemail, typed it, and sent it to the pager. My boss had one of these and frequently had fits about people who left him messages like “Hi Colin. Call me back as soon as you can. Bye.”
Because the message was typed and sent to his pager, he had no way of recognizing the voice and had no idea whom to call back.
I heard about people who had both a pager and a cell phone. Apparently something to do with pagers using a different frequency so were significantly more reliable in elevators, basements, and other places a cell signal couldn’t reach. Never personally tested this though.
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