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they never quite made it into the pantheon of excellent sitcom plot devices like answering machines
Huh. I never thought about it before, but the times I can remember pagers being a significant plot points in sitcoms is when they were already on the way out. Dennis Duffy’s pager business on 30 Rock for example.
They use pagers all the time in Scrubs, since hospitals were one of the last places were pagers were still useful.
No idea if this can be secure in any reasonable way, but one way communication based on cheap devices and available frequencies could be quite attractive for activist mass mobilizations, or disaster
releaseerelief 🤔edit: don’t english before your first coffee
Pagers are still fairly popular for hospital workers because (among other things) they are cheap, minimally distracting, and not that useful if stolen. And they are still very popular among people who have to work in secure areas or on airgapped machines because it is (effectively) one way communication.
But for the vast majority of people? SMS provides all the same benefits (I mean, pagers are basically just one way SMS boxes) and emergency alert systems already exist.
