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The forgotten war on beepers

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Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#21

Post by rightbyte »

samatman wrote: post #16

I got my pager at 18 (no one cool called it a beeper, this was when 'cool' was still a thing), and yes, my weed dealer had one, and knew my beeper code (it was a beeper code but you sent it to a pager, young people just do this). Beeper code is worth explaining: you'd send a number to be called back at, and there was room for more digits, so everyone had a three-digit number which was theirs, and you just kinda had t…

Did people use the telephone number message to send alphabet messages or like '1' for 'I am home' etc?

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#22

Post by vkou »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #19

Lets not forget the : Rock-Satan scare of the 80's. Rap-Drug Scare Walkman will let kids get snatched up. The pager Trans people are coming for your husband. Seems like every decade people have to freak out. But it isn't just the common generational trope. The religious right has to always have another issue that can be used as the poster boy for the war on Lucifer. If you don't have a boogie man, then how do you kee…

Let's also not forget the scares about the dangers of smoking, leaded gasoline, asbestos, licking radium paint, and drunk driving.

Not all new inventions are a net benefit to society just because they are new, not all things are always good in all contexts, and 2024 is not the end of history, or of cultural evolution.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#23

Post by rickydroll »

To me, two things are interesting in this post. First, even though urban legends have been documented and debunked for years, people still get suckered by them. Second, using photographs of newspaper pages is an increasingly rare form of documenting past events. While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#25

Post by Sebb767 »

rickydroll wrote: post #23

To me, two things are interesting in this post. First, even though urban legends have been documented and debunked for years, people still get suckered by them. Second, using photographs of newspaper pages is an increasingly rare form of documenting past events. While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML.

> While you can forge a newspaper page, it is more complicated than tweaking some HTML.

With how many people are skilled in Photoshop compared to web development, forging a scan of a page is probably easier for a lot of people.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#28

Post by nsxwolf »

ok123456 wrote: post #13

The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.

I was approached by the principal while I was using my modified tone dialer on a pay phone in the hall and he freaked out a bit and I showed him it was for dialing stored numbers and he looked at it for a second and said “Ok. It’s just that it looks a lot like a pager… maybe be more discrete with it”

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#30

Post by Mountain_Skies »

drdaeman wrote: post #15
ok123456 wrote: post #13

The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.

> confiscated and held until the end of the school year. How things like that were even remotely legal?

Probably one of those things where if the parent contacted the school, the item would have been returned but most kids didn't want their parents to know they had the item at school in the first place.
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