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Yes I know what a pager is but was surprised the word is still in use.
by kyriakos 3y ago
Yes 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.