5 ms·
Pagers?
by kyriakos 3y ago
Pagers?
- locusofself 3y agoI'm not sure how many companies still use "pagers" aka "beepers", but this person is talking about the device you carry that would alert you when there is a problem with one of your systems. https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=593535494&q=pager&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjB4vmfgKqDAxWkMDQIHfqODaYQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1440&bih=754&dpr=2 https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=593535494&q=pager&tbm=...
- kyriakos 3y agoYes I know what a pager is but was surprised the word is still in use.
- tarxvf 3y agoThe name will live on in "PagerDuty" at a minimum.
- erik_seaberg 3y agoBefore mobile phones and beepers, institutions would use a public address system to announce “paging dr. whoever.” Makes me wonder whether the word comes from sending a “page” (an errand boy) to go look for dr. whoever and bring him back. I guess now “carrying the pager” is a metaphor like “copy and paste” (from the glue used in newspaper layout).
- sneak 3y agoPagers are still in use. They receive signals much better (UHF) than GSM two-way devices. https://americanmessaging.net/ https://americanmessaging.net/
- dredmorbius 3y agoAmazing range, and battery life (often weeks) as well. Not to mention being robust against all kinds of physical abuse, which may itself be a useful characteristic for an on-call comms unit.
- nightfly 3y agoMore months than weeks
- dredmorbius 3y agoYMMV Policy I've seen employed was that the current on-call remained on-call until the pager was fully charged. Dead pagers may be more fun than dead puppies, but that's not a high-prestige contest.
- nrb 3y agoI think they're still prevalent in hospitals due to their reliability and higher connectivity.
- defrost 3y agoThey're coming back you know, just ask Dennis Duffy, Beeper King.
- logical_ferry 3y agoWell played. Technology is cyclical, after all.
- linsomniac 3y agoI will admit that I paused after typing that, but then I figured, as another commenter mentioned, that with PagerDuty being popular, it wasn't too much of a stretch. Admittedly, I'm someone who has carried an honest-to-god pager, the "start the number with 911 if it's an emergency" sort of 10 digit segmented LCD ones. Even remember enjoying the freedom of getting upgraded to one of the national ones when traveling! Though I'm currently thinking about switching from PagerDuty to ntfy.sh/pushover, as it's really hard to justify almost $50/mo per person with Pager Duty for the use my small team makes of it.