A Short History Lesson on Pagers #ThrowbackThursday

​The first pager-like system was used by Police in America in the 1920’s - one-way radio communication receivers (AM) were installed in police vehicles. Following this, government agencies, military, emergency workers and other law enforcement mirrored this service. FM technology was introduced in late 1930’s.

​In the late 1940’s the first wireless pager was created and the first patented devices started being used by doctors in New York in 1950. During this time, the term ‘pager’ was introduced.
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​1960 saw the development of the first transistor pager, and in the mid-60’s the first consumer pager was introduced to the market. The pager was a tone-only device, that would indicate to a recipient that a pre-defined action was required e.g. a tone would indicate to a doctor that they needed to go to the A&E department.

​The 70’s saw the introduction of voice pagers where the devices could relay an audio message in addition to a tone – providing users with useful information.
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​Despite limited range, there were over 3 million pager users worldwide in 1980. During this time, wide-area paging was invented which meant that messages could be conveyed over radio waves across whole towns, cities and even countries. 

It was in the 1980’s when paging really took off. Numeric and alphanumeric pagers were also introduced during this time. 
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​Pagers with keyboards were introduced in the 1990’s so that users could conduct two-way conversations.  With over 60 million pager users around the world, paging was the most preferred and affordable method of mobile communication. The paging industry peaked during this time.

​With the growth in popularity of mobile and smart phones, network providers started to ditch their pager services. Some major players and former rivals joined forces or acquired each other.
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​Today, pagers are embraced by the same groups who used the very first versions. Pagers remain popular because of the reliability of the paging networks. Some argue that until cellular networks can match the survivable architecture of the paging networks, pagers will remain a staple of critical communications for years to come... but is there an even better solution to this so called “survivable architecture”? We think so. #GDBPager #ThrowbackThursday