Old School Pagers (beepers)

Oh how far we have come in telecommunications. While I was looking through some old pictures, I noticed a little rectangular box clipped inside my pocket. It brought back lots of memories. The year was ______ , I was 16 years old and I had just passed my driving test and received a paper temporary license from the DMV. Since I was the first of my friends to be mobile, they decided that they will need to get a hold of me more often so they convinced me that I needed a beeper. At 16, going on 21, I agreed.

 

 

The proud owner of a new paper driver's license, fist full of cash (about $40), and no credit history, I set out to find a retailer that will take my business. After thumbing through the phone book (no Google at the time) and making numerous calls, my friends and I headed out to Pinky's in my mom's Honda Accord. Pinky's was a drive through liquor store that also had a telecommunication's department. I picked the most inexpensive pager, the Motorola Bravo, and I was officially wireless.

This numeric display pager was "THE BOMB". There was 4 setting that alerts you when you have a page: tone and flashing light, flashing light only, LCD visual message display, and the popular vibrate and flashing light mode. The LCD display can only show 12 digits but that was enough to write upside number words like: 00734, 9009, 55373045, 0904, 37047734, 32009, 9075. We got really creative with sentences when the Motorola Bravo Express came out. The LCD display was also backlit so you can check your messages at the dollar movies. The funny thing was, even though the pager has a vibrate mode, when we go the movies, we put it on tone just so everyone would hear when we got beeped.

The pager saves up to 100 characters of data messages in combinations of five 20-character messages and it was cumbersome going through your old pages. It automatically scrolls old numbers and when you get to the one you need, you have to hold the read button to freeze it. If you are making a call, you have to do it one handed.

 

Even though there were accessories like the gold chain clip, we mostly used the belt clip but never clipped on our belt. It was usually clipped in our pockets, on our caps, on the collars of our t-shirts, or inside of our high-top sneakers. We did whatever we could to use things the way is wasn't meant to be used.

The was second pager I owned. The Motorola Bravo Express. I had the blue one which came with a belt clip housing so you can easily remove the pager from whatever it was attached to. This pager store a lot more numbers and had a different tone than the original Bravo.

 

Looking back, I could have never imagined that we would be sporting quad-core smartphones and 4G tablets that does everything but cook your dinner. I can't believe how far we've come and I look forward the innovations of the future.