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> 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

by hiatus 3y ago

> 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.

toast0 3y ago
> 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/dtmmsyst/flex.htm http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr01/dtmms...
- karmajunkie 3y ago
  > 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.
  - toast0 3y ago
    If I has a beeper in school, I'm sure it would have been paged with 8008135... Alphanumeric, watch out.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    Pshaw, but what about the blisteringly high resolution of a TI-83? Find somebody who already has what you want and a link-cable. :P
- hiatus 3y ago
  Service was ~$25/month (and only worked in your area) and you were limited to ~100 messages a month at that price (with each message <100 chars long). I can't imagine browsing the web with that service would be affordable for any real use.
  - jerf 3y ago
    Prior to cell phones being powerful enough to just shove megabytes of JS at them and expect them to work it out, the web had a lot of little subsets like this. I'm sure it wasn't really "the web", but a few pages that used HTTP to access them but if you strayed outside that set it completely disintegrated. I believe I saw some Palm Pilot optimized web sites, there used to be web sites optimized for mobile devices back when that meant something, there were some Dreamcast-optimized sites, etc. It is probably better to imagine it as access to their bespoke services over HTTP, and they were all pretty useless as they lacked any network effect.

by hiatus 3y ago

toast0 3y ago

> 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/dtmmsyst/flex.htm http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr01/dtmms...

karmajunkie 3y ago
> 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.
- toast0 3y ago
  If I has a beeper in school, I'm sure it would have been paged with 8008135... Alphanumeric, watch out.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  Pshaw, but what about the blisteringly high resolution of a TI-83? Find somebody who already has what you want and a link-cable. :P
hiatus 3y ago
Service was ~$25/month (and only worked in your area) and you were limited to ~100 messages a month at that price (with each message <100 chars long). I can't imagine browsing the web with that service would be affordable for any real use.
- jerf 3y ago
  Prior to cell phones being powerful enough to just shove megabytes of JS at them and expect them to work it out, the web had a lot of little subsets like this. I'm sure it wasn't really "the web", but a few pages that used HTTP to access them but if you strayed outside that set it completely disintegrated. I believe I saw some Palm Pilot optimized web sites, there used to be web sites optimized for mobile devices back when that meant something, there were some Dreamcast-optimized sites, etc. It is probably better to imagine it as access to their bespoke services over HTTP, and they were all pretty useless as they lacked any network effect.