The forgotten war on beepers
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The forgotten war on beepers
1–10 of 405 posts
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#2Beepers with text were peak technology.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#3> Senator Ronald Rice passed away in 2023 - the New Jersey Pager ban still in place - months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school.
I was waiting for the author to point to cellphones in the same breath. Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#4I remember learning about these in elementary school. We were sitting in assembly in a room called "The Pod". Listening to rules and administrative things. On the list of banned items never to bring to school, along with drugs, guns, and knives, beepers were listed. I wasn't sure what they were, but from the context and too many cartoons, I assumed they were an explosive device that beeped a few times before blowing up!
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#5> Senator Ronald Rice passed away in 2023 - the New Jersey Pager ban still in place - months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school. I was waiting for the author to point to cellphones in the same breath. Obviously, there is a substan…
> Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones.
Motorola released their two way pager, the Tango in 1995. In 1996, they had an app for the Tango to access the web [1]. You can't make a call with a pager, but nobody makes calls anymore; there's not a lot of difference in capability; although there's a large difference in distribution.
[1] http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr01/dtmms...
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#6Beepers with text were peak technology.
Beepers are the minimal phone that we had all along.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#7Beepers with text were peak technology.
YC summer 24: our beeper-with-text app startup is hiring full stack developers
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#8Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#9> Senator Ronald Rice passed away in 2023 - the New Jersey Pager ban still in place - months later The Washington Post editorial board would call on schools to ban cellphones entirely - part of a new moral panic about kids and digital devices, many of whose parents were once prohibited from bringing pagers to school. I was waiting for the author to point to cellphones in the same breath. Obviously, there is a substan…
> Obviously, there is a substantial difference between a one-way receive-only device and cellphones. Motorola released their two way pager, the Tango in 1995. In 1996, they had an app for the Tango to access the web [1]. You can't make a call with a pager, but nobody makes calls anymore; there's not a lot of difference in capability; although there's a large difference in distribution. [1] http://www.wirelesscommunic…
> not a lot of difference in capability
Ahh yes, I remember fondly the days in the 90's I spent watching porn on my beeper as a teenager. Good times.
Re: The forgotten war on beepers
#10In the late 1990s, my dad attended night classes with other adult learners to earn his MBA. Everywhere he went during those years, my dad had a beeper clipped to his belt for an on-call hospital rotation. During his first week of class, my dad's beeper loudly went off during the middle of the lecture. As my dad scrambled out of the lecture hall to call the number on the little screen, the professor accurately guessed: "You're a doctor, aren't you?"