I was technically a teenager in the 90’s, if you count 1990, My last year of teen-hood. The only people that I knew that had pagers were the jock head of the football team and a couple of weed dudes.
As an adult I exclusively carried a pager from 1995 until 2016, when I left my previous employer, as cell phones and any other two way devices were/are banned in the SCIF.
Otherwise, they shouldn’t/wouldn’t have cared if we didn’t respond while “not working.”
Yep, guaranteed.
In the '90s I was a manager at a company that did packet switching among other things; cutbacks meant many of the staff were gone, so nobody to watch the error printouts from the nodes. I programmed a PC to collect the alarms and send me coded numerical messages using a Hayes modem. Worked pretty well, and I extended the practice to a stock tracker ( I was day trading for a while ). When the Alpha pagers came out they kind of spoiled the game; you needed to talk to an operator to send a message. There was an available plug in so you could automate the process from a PC ( I forget, think they called it a “socket” in those days ??) but the licensing cost was prohibitive
I had a pager in my late teens. We had this thing where I thought someone would page me urgently, but in reality, no one ever needed to send teen me an urgent message. In fact, I can’t remember anyone ever paged me.
187
I remember in college most of the “popular ones” or the ones with cars had the pagers. The ones with loaded parents started getting their own cell phones. But for most of us, we just checked into our campus voicemail to see if anyone was trying to reach us. We started using the emergency campus phones to check our voicemail when that became an option.
I didn’t get my first pager until I graduated, and my friends got frustrated at not being able to reach me all day. We did use some of these pager codes, because East-Asia had ubiquitous adoption of pager tech and I had mostly Asian-American friends at the time. We had codes like 8282 (“fast fast” in Korean). I spelled out my name in numbers because I had a reasonably short name.
I thought that state of affairs would continue for a lot longer, but a I think about only 6 months later I got my first cell phone, because my job needed me to have one.
Ah, I miss the days when a part of my brain was NOT occupied with the possibility that someone might interrupt what I’m doing at the moment. When I could disappear in the library and no one would know (or care) where I was.
We used TelAlert (which, I just checked, still exists). I recall having to edit a config file (or files) each time we added a new carrier. Mainly we sent pages out as dispatches to field technicians so they’d know they had to go work on a hardware problem somewhere. But we also used it to replace the “high severity” alerts I previously mentioned (instead of the unlucky “on call” person being awoken and having to wake up everyone else, we just sent the messages via alpha text).
I just remembered that one summer, there was a lot of sunspot activity – I think this would’ve been 1998 or maybe '99. It affected pages (i.e. the sunspot activity ate them, and they were never delivered). The field tech’s supervisor called me up to complain and asked me what I was going to do about it. It was all I could do to refrain from telling him, “I’ll extinguish the sun.” Then he went on about “working as a team.” At that point I realized, while there is no “I” in “team,” there is a “me” in “team.” There’s also a “mate” which that guy could go do. And if you pad on an extra “e” there’s an “eatme” which he could also go do.
Good times…
Ha, I remember using the “But there is a ‘me’ in team” ironic comment a lot in those days… My experience with callouts was better than yours; when we got our ‘advanced’ packet switch from Spain it was very troublesome at first. Every day, I would get calls at home that usually involved a few minutes of phone consultation; no big deal, I didn’t worry about it. But, one of the directors did, worried that I might not be available, decided to make me a permanent call out, paying me 4.5 hours extra per day just to be available, and three hours for each call. I think he was really trying to embarrass the team ( that word again ) that selected this equipment, but good for me 
The only person I knew in the 90s with a pager was my dealer, and he was always too high to figure out how it worked.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
