Speaker 1: With technology with tech Stuff from works dot com. Hey there,
Speaker 1: and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland.
Speaker 1: I'm an executive producer at how Stuff Works. If you
Speaker 1: think my voice sounds a little odd, I'm coming down
Speaker 1: with a cold. But as I record this, this is
Speaker 1: the last episode of tech Stuff. I'm recording in the
Speaker 1: year seventeen, although you are hearing it in the year eighteen,
Speaker 1: So you're listening to me from the past, unless you're
Speaker 1: in the chat room at twitch dot tv slash slash
Speaker 1: tech Stuff, in which case you're actually watching me record
Speaker 1: it right now, So you're hearing a episode seventeen, in
Speaker 1: which case, uh, we traveled to the future. That's how
Speaker 1: time works. And speaking of time, you know, I've I've
Speaker 1: covered some cutting edge technologies recently and talked about blockchain,
Speaker 1: which will be an episode coming up soon. That's all
Speaker 1: about the technology of the future. Well, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about the technology of the past today and talk
Speaker 1: about pagers or beepers. Uh, something that's classic, right, the
Speaker 1: humble pager. The beeper This is the device that gives
Speaker 1: you an alert to an incoming message, so as you
Speaker 1: can dash out of a theater in dramatic fashion to
Speaker 1: make an important phone call on a pay phone outside.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, there used to be pay phones too. So
Speaker 1: where did pagers come from and how do they work?
Speaker 1: So that's our focus of our show today. So to start,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a trip all the way back to
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty one, which was a tumultuous year. Socialism and
Speaker 1: communism were sweeping Eastern Europe and parts of Asia. Russia
Speaker 1: was expanding its borders and invading various nations to claim
Speaker 1: them for its own. Northern Ireland got its own parliament
Speaker 1: in nine. Adolf Hitler would become the fearer of the
Speaker 1: Nazi Party in nineteen twenty one, and the first White
Speaker 1: Castle Hamburger joint opened in Wichita, Kansas in nineteen twenty one,
Speaker 1: spelling doom for us all. But also in that year,
Speaker 1: the Detroit Police Force implemented what is generally agreed upon
Speaker 1: as the precursor to pagers, and that system was actually
Speaker 1: a one way radio communication system, which when you boil
Speaker 1: a pager down, that's what your typical pager is. By
Speaker 1: the way, don't boil down pagers, it will ruin them.
Speaker 1: But a pager ultimately is a receiver that's at one
Speaker 1: end of a radio communications system. Let's get back to
Speaker 1: those Detroit police. So it's the nineteen twenties and the
Speaker 1: United States was dealing with some pretty serious crime. This
Speaker 1: was an era of bank robberies and bootlegging. Prohibition, that's
Speaker 1: the era that made alcohol illegal in the United States
Speaker 1: began in nineteen twenty and it would remain in effect
Speaker 1: until December nineteen thirty three. The constitutional amendment that outlawed
Speaker 1: the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol in the United
Speaker 1: States created enormous opportunity for criminals because people love their hooch,
Speaker 1: and so it became incredibly profitable to smuggle alcohol. Gangsters
Speaker 1: made a fortune off of bootlegging and other illegal activities,
Speaker 1: and the police were largely unprepared to deal with this
Speaker 1: problem in the major metropolitan areas. This was before two
Speaker 1: way radios were small enough to fit into police cruisers,
Speaker 1: and so there was no easy way to send out
Speaker 1: a message among a police force to have them close
Speaker 1: in on the bad guys. But three Detroit police officers,
Speaker 1: Kenneth our Cox, Walter Vogler, and Bernard Fitzgerald, had an idea.
Speaker 1: They experimented by putting radio sets in the back seats
Speaker 1: of their model t Ford police patrol cars, and yeah,
Speaker 1: it took up pretty much the whole seat. The radio
Speaker 1: sets weren't special in any way, and though they could
Speaker 1: pick up a signal, they weren't terribly consistent. They also
Speaker 1: didn't operate on a special bandwidth, which meant police back
Speaker 1: at HQ, but have to broadcast on a normal channel,
Speaker 1: which could be picked up by anyone with a radio set.
Speaker 1: So if you wanted to listen in on police radio,
Speaker 1: which again was just a one way communication from headquarters
Speaker 1: to a few cruisers that had radio sets, you could
Speaker 1: do it. In fact, in order to operate, the Detroit
Speaker 1: Police Force had to register their police radio station as
Speaker 1: an entertainment station and they would play recorded music whenever
Speaker 1: they weren't reading off lists of stolen vehicles or other
Speaker 1: criminal information. And the call sign for this radio station
Speaker 1: was ko P COP. Pretty cute, right, all that's true?
Speaker 1: By nine Kenneth Cox, one of those three police officers,
Speaker 1: and an engineering student named Robert L. Bats built a
Speaker 1: radio set specifically for a vehicle. It was stable, it
Speaker 1: had its own antenna, and the antenna could attached to
Speaker 1: the car, and the Detroit Police Force began to install
Speaker 1: those kinds of systems into cruisers for real. In n
Speaker 1: the Detroit Police for became the first law enforcement agency
Speaker 1: to dispatch police cars by radio. Other cities would soon
Speaker 1: follow that lead, and it might be a good idea
Speaker 1: to have a brief refresher on how radio communication works.
Speaker 1: With one way communication, you're working with a transmitter and
Speaker 1: a receiver. We'll look at both of these components. Will
Speaker 1: start with the transmitter first, you need a power supply.
Speaker 1: Next along the chain of components is a device called
Speaker 1: an oscillator, which creates an alternating current at a particular frequency.
Speaker 1: And typically you'd use the oscillator to create a sign wave.
Speaker 1: This would serve as your basic radio signal, also known
Speaker 1: as the carrier signal. But here's a problem. That signal
Speaker 1: carries no information. You could send it out, but it
Speaker 1: would just be blank. It would be nothing to send
Speaker 1: information along such a signal. You have to modify the
Speaker 1: signal in some way, and with radio as you do
Speaker 1: this with a modulator. Modulators affect the sign waves sent
Speaker 1: by radio signals in some fundamental way. There are two
Speaker 1: main approaches to doing this. There's amplitude modulation or a
Speaker 1: M That involves increasing or decreasing the amplitude or intensity
Speaker 1: of the sign waves. So if you draw a sign
Speaker 1: wave out going from left to right, the height of
Speaker 1: the peaks and the depth of the troughs, that's your amplitude.
Speaker 1: So if you make them taller and you make the
Speaker 1: troughs deeper, you're increasing the amplitude of that wave. Then
Speaker 1: there's frequency modulation or FM, which involves changing the frequency
Speaker 1: of a radio wave. So that involves decreasing the wave
Speaker 1: length now so that you have more of these waves
Speaker 1: pass a given point within a second. That's your frequency.
Speaker 1: So if you think again about this is a time function.
Speaker 1: You've got this form of a wave. It passes through
Speaker 1: a point. Let's say that it's fast enough where a
Speaker 1: thousand of them pass a point a specific point in
Speaker 1: space every second. That's a thousand hurts. That's one thousand
Speaker 1: wavelengths per second. If you were to decrease that, you know,
Speaker 1: decrease the length of the waves, they're still traveling at
Speaker 1: the same speed, but now there's they're squished, right, you
Speaker 1: get more waves in per second. Now it might be
Speaker 1: five thousand or five thousand hurts. It's five thousand wavelengths
Speaker 1: per second. So next you would typically have an amplifier
Speaker 1: and that would take this signal and create an amplified
Speaker 1: version of it, which then gets sent to an antenna,
Speaker 1: a transmittle emitter antenna. The antenna essentially converts this electrical
Speaker 1: signal into radio waves, which propagate out from the antenna
Speaker 1: into the surrounding environment. The amplifier and antenna determine how
Speaker 1: far the signal will carry, So when you hear about
Speaker 1: transmitters and how powerful they are, you're really thinking about
Speaker 1: what's the amplification. Uh And some radio broadcast towers have
Speaker 1: much greater amplification than others, which is why you can
Speaker 1: pick them up further away than the their their counterparts.
Speaker 1: Now on the receiver side, you have a very similar
Speaker 1: series of components. First, we'll start with the receiver's antenna.
Speaker 1: We're gonna go from where the signal comes in and
Speaker 1: work our way inward. So the antenna captures the radio waves,
Speaker 1: or rather we could say the radio waves induce an
Speaker 1: alternating current to flow through the antenna that goes to
Speaker 1: an amplifier, which detects this electrical signal and boosts it
Speaker 1: so that a detector can separate the relevant information from
Speaker 1: the base carrier sign wave. In audio radios, you also
Speaker 1: have a couple of other elements, like a tuner, because
Speaker 1: there are lots of different frequencies you can broadcast at,
Speaker 1: so a tuner allows you to tune into that band
Speaker 1: of frequencies um and it ignores everything else, so that
Speaker 1: way you can just concentrate on the radio station you
Speaker 1: want to hear. Otherwise you would get all radio stations
Speaker 1: all the time, and that would be annoying. You also
Speaker 1: have an audio amplifier, typically in your regular sumer radio.
Speaker 1: That I mean you have to otherwise you're not gonna
Speaker 1: hear anything that boosts the signal, so it's strong enough
Speaker 1: to make the speakers work. So essentially, what you're doing
Speaker 1: is you're taking some information, you transform that information into
Speaker 1: electrical signals. You use that to modify a carrier wave.
Speaker 1: You amplify that wave and send it out over in
Speaker 1: antenna to create radio signals. Those radio signals get picked
Speaker 1: up by a receiver's antenna and essentially revert that receiver
Speaker 1: reverses this process. Now, I mentioned that Detroit started using
Speaker 1: this one way radio communication, which at the time depended
Speaker 1: upon amplitude modulation radio signals am back in nine in
Speaker 1: an official capacity, but a year earlier, a young boy
Speaker 1: who would become incredibly important in the development of multiple
Speaker 1: wireless technologies first became fascinated with radio. That boy's name
Speaker 1: was al Gross. He was nine years old in nineteen seven,
Speaker 1: and he was on a steamship traveling across the Great Lakes,
Speaker 1: and he got to tour the ship and he got
Speaker 1: up to the radio room and he thought it was
Speaker 1: absolutely fascinating. He could hear the wireless being operated on there.
Speaker 1: And the operator brought Al Gross into the room and
Speaker 1: explained what the equipment was and and Gross was completely
Speaker 1: blown away. Eleven years later, Al Gross develops a prototype
Speaker 1: of a two way radio communications device, and Gross gave
Speaker 1: the gadget an interesting name. He called it the Walkey Talkie.
Speaker 1: His invention brought him to the attention of the United
Speaker 1: States Office of Strategic Services, which would eventually evolve into
Speaker 1: the Central Intelligence Agency, and Gross was recruited to develop
Speaker 1: this technology for military use, specifically creating a way for
Speaker 1: covert communication between aircraft and troops while the troops were
Speaker 1: behind enemy lines during World War Two. After the war,
Speaker 1: Gross built his own business called Gross Electronics Incorporated and
Speaker 1: filed a dozen patents relating to wireless communication, a lot
Speaker 1: of which would end up being really important over the
Speaker 1: following decades, including one that described the circuitry needed for
Speaker 1: a personal paging system. And this would be in nineteen nine.
Speaker 1: A year earlier, by the way, he had actually pioneered
Speaker 1: citizens band radio or CB radio, So you radio fans
Speaker 1: out there should really raise a glass to Mr Al Gross. Now.
Speaker 1: Gross's breakthrough in nineteen nine was adapting his walkie talkie
Speaker 1: technology for cordless remote telephonic signaling, and essentially his system
Speaker 1: used radios to alert doctors for specific messages. Hospitals have
Speaker 1: been relying on intercom systems with speakers wired up throughout
Speaker 1: the building. You might be familiar with the classic line
Speaker 1: paging Dr Howard, Dr Fine, Dr Howard. If you are
Speaker 1: be sure to shout out to me what that's from,
Speaker 1: because I'm always happy to meet another cultured individual. The
Speaker 1: intercom system was a bit intrusive, and it meant that
Speaker 1: doctors frequently had to listen for messages that they really
Speaker 1: didn't need to worry about because it wasn't for them.
Speaker 1: Gross's solution was these pages. The they weren't called pagers yet.
Speaker 1: The gadgets had what M i T calls discriminating circuitry,
Speaker 1: which just means the circuits could detect a specific signal
Speaker 1: so that the owner of the pager would only get
Speaker 1: alerts intended for that person. And that's an important distinction.
Speaker 1: A commercial radio is just a dumb receiver, so you
Speaker 1: can tune it to a specific band of frequencies, but
Speaker 1: you're getting the same signal as everyone else that's also
Speaker 1: tuned to that band. If you want to send a
Speaker 1: message to a specific person, you need to have some
Speaker 1: way to indicate to that person's radio device that there's
Speaker 1: a personal message for them and have that device ignore
Speaker 1: anything that wasn't intended for its owner. So how does
Speaker 1: it do that? Well, we'll cover it in just a second,
Speaker 1: but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay,
Speaker 1: So how do you make sure a pager knows which
Speaker 1: signal is meant or hit? Well. One way to do
Speaker 1: that is to create a system in which every pager
Speaker 1: unit within a service has a specific set of audio
Speaker 1: tones associated with it. Early pages used a two tone system.
Speaker 1: Typically you describe them as an A tone and a
Speaker 1: B tone. And these tones would be anywhere from three
Speaker 1: hurts to three thousand hurts, and frequency which is within
Speaker 1: the range of human hearing, which averages out to hurt hurts,
Speaker 1: although you start to lose those higher ranges as you
Speaker 1: get older. The two tones would also last a specific
Speaker 1: amount of time each, and the combination of the tone's
Speaker 1: frequency and duration would be enough to create unique call
Speaker 1: signs for each pager. The approach did have some limitations, however, Namely,
Speaker 1: it limited how many pages could be connected to a
Speaker 1: single system. Early pages topped out at fewer than a
Speaker 1: thousand units per systems, somewhere in the realm of eight
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty or so, which works fine. If the
Speaker 1: pages are meant for a specific place like a hospital
Speaker 1: or even a restaurant, you're never going to need more
Speaker 1: than that. But if you wanted a general consumer pager,
Speaker 1: that was not going to cut it. You max out
Speaker 1: your customer base if fewer than one thousand, and if
Speaker 1: you wanted to grow, you'd have to implement news systems
Speaker 1: and administer them all at the same time using different
Speaker 1: radio frequencies. It would just become a nightmare. Later, pager
Speaker 1: manufacturers would switch to a five six tone system, which
Speaker 1: meant that the identification code would consist of either five
Speaker 1: or six audio tones that increase the potential number of
Speaker 1: pages on the single system dramatically to more than a
Speaker 1: hundred thousand up to a million. As for the messages,
Speaker 1: those also varied. The early pagers were really just one
Speaker 1: way radios, similar to what Detroit had been using decades earlier.
Speaker 1: Al Gross's invention was meant for doctors to wear in
Speaker 1: their clothing. An operator would work a central switchboard and
Speaker 1: when a request would come in for a specific doctor,
Speaker 1: the operator would activate the circuit for that doctors specific
Speaker 1: pager frequency. Though it's send a signal that the doctor's
Speaker 1: pager would pick up, and the pager would make some
Speaker 1: sort of audible alert also known as a noise to
Speaker 1: let the doctor know, Hey, you need to listen to me.
Speaker 1: The doctor would hold up the pag or to their
Speaker 1: ear and listen as a voice clear as a day,
Speaker 1: if a day were you know, a little fuzzy, with
Speaker 1: some feedback, and it would say something like dr fine,
Speaker 1: please report to the ICU. The technology didn't really catch
Speaker 1: on outside of a few narrow uses. The Jewish Hospital
Speaker 1: in New York City saw the value, but according to
Speaker 1: al Gross, he encountered a lot of reluctance among other
Speaker 1: doctors who seemed to hate the idea, and they didn't
Speaker 1: really care for the fact that someone could get ahold
Speaker 1: of them at any time, like when they're playing golf,
Speaker 1: for example. That was al Gross's joke, by the way,
Speaker 1: not mine. And so while his idea was demonstrably useful,
Speaker 1: it was still ahead of its time, and he he
Speaker 1: couldn't get any of the big electronics companies really interested
Speaker 1: in it at first either. But in ninety a company
Speaker 1: called to L answer Phone. Yeah, that's a fun one
Speaker 1: to read off and then say, wait, how do I
Speaker 1: say this out loud? To L answer Phone operate a
Speaker 1: paging service for doctors in New York. It was not automated,
Speaker 1: generally speaking. The way the paging service worked was that
Speaker 1: you would call a number. Let's say it's a patient
Speaker 1: and a doctor, because it was almost exclusively used by doctors.
Speaker 1: A patient calls a doctor's number, the doctor fails to
Speaker 1: pick up the phone. The call, after a certain number
Speaker 1: of rings, relays to a messaging service where a human
Speaker 1: being listens to the message takes it down for the doctor.
Speaker 1: If the call is urgent. The messaging service then makes
Speaker 1: a note that this needs to be broadcast to the
Speaker 1: doctor's pager using a three digit code number unique to
Speaker 1: that doctor. Once an hour, the doctor is expected to
Speaker 1: turn on their receiver and listen into a series of
Speaker 1: three digit codes. If the doctor's own code is among them,
Speaker 1: the doctor is to call into the messaging service to
Speaker 1: find out what's going on, and once the doctor checks in,
Speaker 1: the messaging service removes the doctor's code from the broadcast.
Speaker 1: So this pager did not alert you when you got
Speaker 1: a new message. Instead, you actually had to turn it
Speaker 1: on actively and listen in to find out if you
Speaker 1: had any messages. The codes themselves were recorded on sixteen
Speaker 1: millimeter film, and that film was then encased in plastic
Speaker 1: sticks which could be hung on a looped belt of
Speaker 1: a transmitting machine. So this belt would just rotate through
Speaker 1: and these little plastic sticks with film in them would
Speaker 1: get scanned by a reader and that would pick up
Speaker 1: what the code was for that particular piece of film.
Speaker 1: It would then broadcast that information out uh in its
Speaker 1: actual broadcast. That broadcast gets repeated every single minute for
Speaker 1: an hour. After a doctor called in, you would just
Speaker 1: remove that doctor's stick from the belt and it would
Speaker 1: then remove that three digit number from the broadcast, which
Speaker 1: seems pretty wild to me. It's kind of an interesting concept.
Speaker 1: Doctors would actually pay to be included on this service.
Speaker 1: It cost about twelve dollars a month back in the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties, and the range on the broadcast tower was
Speaker 1: twenty five miles twenty five mile radius around the tower.
Speaker 1: Oh and we still weren't calling them pagers, even though
Speaker 1: they worked on what was referred to as a paging service.
Speaker 1: So they called the service a paging one. But the
Speaker 1: devices we're still just kind of radios. They weren't called pagers.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until a decade after Gross's attempts, so we're
Speaker 1: talking nineteen fifty nine, that we finally get the word pager.
Speaker 1: That word was coined by a little company called Motorola.
Speaker 1: The original Motorola pager was a personal radio communications device.
Speaker 1: It could transmit radio messages to pager owners. This one
Speaker 1: got a bit more traction than Gross's approach. Also, by
Speaker 1: this time, some of the patents Gross had filed were expiring.
Speaker 1: Now that's what happens with patents. When you file a patent,
Speaker 1: you have exclusive rights to that particular implementation of ideas
Speaker 1: for the duration of the patent. In return, you submit
Speaker 1: documentation describing those ideas, and that documentation is publicly available
Speaker 1: through the patent office. So if anyone wants to use
Speaker 1: your implementation, they can see how you did it, more
Speaker 1: or less, but they're supposed to come to you and
Speaker 1: negotiate a license or otherwise purchased the Latin or they
Speaker 1: can just bide their time and wait until the patent
Speaker 1: has expired, and then they can use that same implementation,
Speaker 1: because at that point it's a fair game, which is
Speaker 1: more or less what Motorola was able to do, and
Speaker 1: it wasn't necessarily malicious. Gross's ideas were great, but the
Speaker 1: world just wasn't really ready for it yet, and the
Speaker 1: technology Gross used was a bit bulkier than the tech
Speaker 1: available a decade later. Motorola's approach, well very similar to Grosses,
Speaker 1: was more practical by ninety nine. Even so, the pagers
Speaker 1: Motorola offered weren't exactly like the ones we'd see later on,
Speaker 1: it did evolve over time. In nineteen sixty an inventor
Speaker 1: named John Francis Mitchell developed the first pager of this style,
Speaker 1: to use transistors. See earlier pages were actually using vacuum tubes,
Speaker 1: which made the pages larger, heavier, and it meant they
Speaker 1: could heat up if they were used a lot, although
Speaker 1: the nature of pages meant that that rarely ever happened.
Speaker 1: Mitchell was able to make a pager using transistors instead
Speaker 1: of vacuum tubes, and he was a chief engineer a
Speaker 1: motor Ela and would eventually rise to the rank of
Speaker 1: president and CEO of the company. He'd also play an
Speaker 1: instrumental part in developing the technology that made cell phones possible.
Speaker 1: Bell System the Telephone company offered a paging service as
Speaker 1: early as nineteen sixty two using a gadget they called
Speaker 1: the bell Boy, which is just so adorable. It contained
Speaker 1: three receivers. Each receiver was tuned to a different frequency,
Speaker 1: so the pager would only activate if all three receivers
Speaker 1: picked up a signal simultaneously. You had to send three
Speaker 1: signals of those three frequencies for the pager to react.
Speaker 1: This would also cause the Bellboy to make a noise,
Speaker 1: which would alert the owner to a call that they
Speaker 1: needed to call into a central messaging service in order
Speaker 1: to get their relevant message. So again, I didn't tell
Speaker 1: you what the message was, but rather that you had
Speaker 1: received a message and you needed to call into your
Speaker 1: answering service to find out what that was. In nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four, Motorola introduced the page boy. Now, originally this
Speaker 1: was a tone pager, which meant it would only send
Speaker 1: a tone to the targeted device, and the tone would
Speaker 1: indicate whatever your specific course of action should be, such
Speaker 1: as call the home office or get your took us
Speaker 1: to the emergency room as soon as possible. Within a
Speaker 1: couple of years, Motorola began offering tone and voice page boys,
Speaker 1: which could play either a tone or an actual voice message. Now,
Speaker 1: clearly voice messages can relay more information than just when
Speaker 1: you hear this noise, do this thing. But in any case,
Speaker 1: these technologies all involved broadcasting a message out into the environment.
Speaker 1: And when the Motoroles moved to make Pages a consumer product,
Speaker 1: the man explained to customers, Okay, this product works, but
Speaker 1: only if you live with an X number of miles
Speaker 1: of this broadcast tower, because the alternative meant broadcasting the
Speaker 1: same message across numerous towers, because you never know where
Speaker 1: you're intended recipient might be. The pages in those days
Speaker 1: were all one way receivers, so again they gave no
Speaker 1: information back to their system. There was no nationwide paging
Speaker 1: system set up yet, so they're all local area, one
Speaker 1: way communication devices. Now, this makes it a great time
Speaker 1: to address a cliche about pagers that was prevalent in
Speaker 1: the eighties and nineties and up to today really, and
Speaker 1: that was that the only people who carried pages around
Speaker 1: were doctors and drug dealers. Why drug dealers because they
Speaker 1: could get a message from someone who wanted to buy drugs,
Speaker 1: but the drug dealer would never be tracked because pages
Speaker 1: are just dumb receivers. They couldn't reveal information about the
Speaker 1: drug dealers whereabouts. I gave the dealer the ability to
Speaker 1: receive messages, decide which ones to respond to, and keep
Speaker 1: everything below the radar. But these messages also for the
Speaker 1: most part, were unencrypted, which meant was possible to intercept
Speaker 1: these messages and hear them unencrypted and understand exactly what
Speaker 1: was being sent to them. So you also had to
Speaker 1: be sneaky about you know what the messages content actually was.
Speaker 1: Now I also need to point out that eventually there
Speaker 1: would be two way pagers on the market, and those
Speaker 1: products allow for communication to flow in both directions from
Speaker 1: the system to the pager and vice versa. Now, under
Speaker 1: that kind of system, you definitely could track a person's
Speaker 1: general location, at least based off which receiving tower was
Speaker 1: picking up the pagers responses. But that was different and
Speaker 1: those wouldn't come into play until the mid nineteen nineties.
Speaker 1: Now I've got a lot more to talk about with pagers.
Speaker 1: We've got some stuff to chat about as far as
Speaker 1: protocols go and the different numeric and alpha numeric approaches
Speaker 1: to paging. But before I jump into that next section,
Speaker 1: let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Well.
Speaker 1: Time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping, and by nineteen eighty,
Speaker 1: we're looking at about three point two million pagers deployed
Speaker 1: out in the real world. That's globally, and these were
Speaker 1: all limited range pagers, meaning you still had to be
Speaker 1: within the broadcast range of a specific service to get
Speaker 1: your notifications. Now, if that service went across a couple
Speaker 1: of cities, you might be able to get your notification
Speaker 1: if you went from one city to the other, but
Speaker 1: most cases it meant that you really couldn't travel very
Speaker 1: far away and still get notified. So outside of the
Speaker 1: effective range of the broadcast tower. The pages just a
Speaker 1: hunk of circuits and plastic. It was only when wide
Speaker 1: aid area paging came about, which allowed messages to be
Speaker 1: broadcast via radio across large areas, probably getting from city
Speaker 1: to city and even across countries, that they became a
Speaker 1: big consumer product that they began to Once they started
Speaker 1: creating these wide area networks using very high frequencies instead
Speaker 1: of lower frequencies in order to send these signals out,
Speaker 1: those would travel much further, which means you don't need
Speaker 1: as many towers to have your message go out across
Speaker 1: a wide area. Um. They also tend to travel better
Speaker 1: through buildings, which cell phone service doesn't necessarily do that. Um.
Speaker 1: When I talk about who's using pages today, we'll chat
Speaker 1: a little bit more about that. So around the same
Speaker 1: time in the early engineers created the protocols that would
Speaker 1: allow paging systems to transmit numeric data to pagers, which
Speaker 1: meant pages needed something new. They needed a display, because
Speaker 1: before it was just a radio, right or just something
Speaker 1: that made noise. In some cases it would just beap.
Speaker 1: In fact, that's why we call them beepers. The original
Speaker 1: page boy had this very uh distinct beeping sound, and
Speaker 1: people started calling them beepers. Using low power and LCD screens,
Speaker 1: you could give them an actual display and the pages
Speaker 1: could show a sequence of numbers. Those numbers could be
Speaker 1: a phone number, so you could get a message saying
Speaker 1: that just gives you a phone number that you're supposed
Speaker 1: to call, or it may be a series of digits
Speaker 1: that represent a specific action. So for example, one to
Speaker 1: three might mean call headquarters to receive a message, or
Speaker 1: you might have another code that tells you this is
Speaker 1: an emergency code. You need to get back to the hospital.
Speaker 1: There's a surgery that's waiting for you, that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So there's another feature that doctors relied upon because it's
Speaker 1: sped up communication considerably and gave clear instructions regarding where
Speaker 1: a doctor should go went on call. This is also
Speaker 1: the time that paging systems began to create interfaces that
Speaker 1: allowed you to page someone by placing a call to
Speaker 1: a page number. Using the telephone system. Before that, you
Speaker 1: would have to just call a service, or you would
Speaker 1: have to wait till US answering service answered your call
Speaker 1: before and they would send the message onto the paging system. Now,
Speaker 1: the paging systems were starting to get integrated directly into
Speaker 1: the telephone system, so you could have an interface from
Speaker 1: your phone to the paging system. A few years later,
Speaker 1: when we get into the mid nineteen eighties, new protocols
Speaker 1: and displays allowed for alpha numeric messages. Now you can
Speaker 1: actually send words to someone, not just a series of numbers. Now.
Speaker 1: This necessitated the development of some protocols required to transmit
Speaker 1: data to pager systems, and there are a few of them.
Speaker 1: In Europe, the dominant protocol was called poc SAG poc
Speaker 1: s a G now that was an acronym that stood
Speaker 1: for Post Office Code Standardization Advisory Group. In the United States,
Speaker 1: the dominant protocol was once again from Motorola and it
Speaker 1: was called FLEX. These were the sets of rules that
Speaker 1: made it possible to administer a large system of one
Speaker 1: way radio receivers. Poc SAG and FLEX worked in slightly
Speaker 1: different ways. With poc SAG, a system would send out
Speaker 1: two messages to relay information to a specific pager. The
Speaker 1: first message was a wake up message, and that would
Speaker 1: bring pages out of a sleep mode. The wake up
Speaker 1: message says I've got a broadcast coming, so you better
Speaker 1: be ready, and the pages would switch from sleep mode
Speaker 1: to active. The sleep mode helped conserve battery life. After
Speaker 1: waking up, the pager would wait for a second message
Speaker 1: that would contain data meant not just for that single pager,
Speaker 1: and the data arrived in blocks called frames, so the
Speaker 1: pager would seek out the information within those frames that
Speaker 1: pertained specifically to the pager itself and extract that information
Speaker 1: from the entire frame and give it to user. Flex,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, relied on pagers scanning for unretreated
Speaker 1: messages at predetermined intervals. So, in other words, a FLEX
Speaker 1: pager would follow an instruction such as every fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: checked for unretrieved messages by doing a scan on the antenna.
Speaker 1: Motorola's logic for the following this approach was two fold.
Speaker 1: It kept air waves less cluttered, and it would also
Speaker 1: help conserve battery life in the long run. Later, Motorola
Speaker 1: would introduce a new protocol called Reflex, which wasn't just
Speaker 1: a great Duran Durant song and pagers. Reflex was a
Speaker 1: protocol that allowed for two way paging systems, meaning you
Speaker 1: could use your pager to reply to messages. This turned
Speaker 1: pagers into effectively text messengers. Sort of a precursor to
Speaker 1: sell and smartphones. One of the earliest two way consumer
Speaker 1: pagers was the Tango, once again created by Motorola. It
Speaker 1: could receive text messages and short emails, but your responses
Speaker 1: were limited to a few sta entered options. You only
Speaker 1: had like four buttons to use, so you couldn't type
Speaker 1: in stuff, but you could select from some standard responses
Speaker 1: if you weren't next to a phone and couldn't call
Speaker 1: the person immediately. This particular device hit the market in
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen nineties, and in Research in Motion a
Speaker 1: k A Rim a k a. BlackBerry created a device
Speaker 1: called the inter at Active. Pager's interactive with the AT
Speaker 1: symbol right in the middle there, and it's sported its
Speaker 1: own full Quarty keyboard and let you respond to messages
Speaker 1: with your own customized responses. Another protocol developed around this
Speaker 1: time was the Telelocator Alpha Numeric Protocol or TAP, which
Speaker 1: was originally known as the Motorola Page Entry or PET protocol.
Speaker 1: This one created an industry standard for sending alpha numeric
Speaker 1: messages to pagers. It lets you send an alpha numeric
Speaker 1: message to a pager service, which then would forward that
Speaker 1: message onto pagers themselves and later to mobile phones. Now
Speaker 1: these days, pages rely on very high frequency transmissions, like
Speaker 1: I said, which can go great distances, so that cuts
Speaker 1: down those transmitters. So if you're going to be in
Speaker 1: a horror movie, and I don't mean go to a
Speaker 1: horror movie, I mean if you're going to be in
Speaker 1: a horror movie, make sure you have a pager with you,
Speaker 1: because chances are something's gonna happen that makes your cell
Speaker 1: phone not work, But pagers might still work because those
Speaker 1: signals travel further, and often you can end up getting
Speaker 1: a page even if a cell phone signal can't get through.
Speaker 1: This is the reason why certain people still carry pages,
Speaker 1: because they're more reliable in those kind of situations. So
Speaker 1: you could get a very valuable piece of information while
Speaker 1: you're in that horror movie, something like don't go in
Speaker 1: that door, and then you don't go in that door
Speaker 1: and you and you get to be one of the
Speaker 1: ones that lives. There is a downside though, one way pagers,
Speaker 1: like I said, they don't send any information back to
Speaker 1: the system, which means you never know if your message
Speaker 1: actually got to the pager you were sending it to
Speaker 1: unless someone calls and responds to it. So if I
Speaker 1: send out a message to your pager, I don't get
Speaker 1: a notification if it got to you or not, because
Speaker 1: it's a one way communication. The radio wave goes out,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't come back. So unless you call me,
Speaker 1: I don't know for sure that you got the message.
Speaker 1: My only real recourse is to send the page again
Speaker 1: and again. And in fact, this was often a piece
Speaker 1: of information people who owned pagers would tell people. They said, listen,
Speaker 1: if you page me and you don't hear from me
Speaker 1: within like a minute, go ahead and page me again,
Speaker 1: because chances are I might have been in a spot
Speaker 1: where I was just outside of range, or maybe I
Speaker 1: had turned off my pager for a second. But if
Speaker 1: I haven't called you back within a minute, go ahead
Speaker 1: and try again, and do it again and again and again. Ah,
Speaker 1: which could get really irritating of a lee if you
Speaker 1: just don't want to answer a page, But it was
Speaker 1: also necessary because there was no way to be sure
Speaker 1: that your message was getting through. So go ahead and
Speaker 1: be obnoxious, is what I'm saying now. Over time, the
Speaker 1: consumer pager space began to diminish, which is not a
Speaker 1: big shock because cell phones largely made most use cases
Speaker 1: for pagers moot, at least for your average person. By
Speaker 1: two thousand one, Motorola was actually getting out of the game.
Speaker 1: They had been the dominant player in paging services since
Speaker 1: the nineteen seventies. Eventually, a new company called us A Mobility,
Speaker 1: formed out of a merger between two other companies, Metro
Speaker 1: Call Holdings and Arch Wireless. Us A Mobility began to
Speaker 1: take over the paging landscape in the United States, eventually
Speaker 1: merging with another company called am Com Software and then
Speaker 1: transforming into a new entity called Spock s p o K.
Speaker 1: Spot continues to create pages, including models that allow for
Speaker 1: encrypted paging services, which is a pretty big shift from
Speaker 1: earlier technologies which were unencrypted and thus a potential liability.
Speaker 1: You may have even heard about that that you don't
Speaker 1: send that that sensitive information via paging because of that,
Speaker 1: And while you don't see them out and about nearly
Speaker 1: as much these days, lots of people still use pagers.
Speaker 1: Doctors and first responders often have them, as they are
Speaker 1: reliable and they're efficient for specific types of data relays.
Speaker 1: But it's pretty clear that the SMS protocols cell phones
Speaker 1: smartphones have largely replaced much of our pager needs. Unless
Speaker 1: we're in these narrow use cases, unless you're waiting at
Speaker 1: a restaurant, many of those still use simple pages to
Speaker 1: alert people when the table is ready. You get that
Speaker 1: little coaster that lights up as a paging system. So
Speaker 1: these days I find more and more people are using
Speaker 1: phone numbers to send text messages or even a quick
Speaker 1: phone call to alert people to a ready table. So
Speaker 1: even this is a fading use, I would say, of
Speaker 1: the paging system. Oh and by the way, if you
Speaker 1: want to know how some of these pages actually vibrate
Speaker 1: or self ohones or smartphones or game controllers, the answer
Speaker 1: is actually pretty simple. Inside the device, you have a
Speaker 1: direct current motor and it has a spindle that it
Speaker 1: can turn. The spindle rotates that are pretty high speed,
Speaker 1: but attached to the spindle is an off center weight,
Speaker 1: so the spindle has always weighted heavier to one side
Speaker 1: versus the other. So as it spends, that weight creates
Speaker 1: the vibration as the momentum shifts inside the device at
Speaker 1: high speeds. Just like you should know. And that is
Speaker 1: generally speaking, hell pagers work and how they evolved over time.
Speaker 1: It's an interesting story to kind of look back on.
Speaker 1: It's Also, I think interesting to note that out Gross
Speaker 1: never really became rich off his ideas. His ideas would
Speaker 1: be the foundation not just for pagers, but also for
Speaker 1: cell phone at technologies and other wireless technologies, but he
Speaker 1: wasn't really able to capitalize on them while the patents
Speaker 1: were still in effect. It was only after the patents
Speaker 1: had expired the Motorola kind of stepped in and started
Speaker 1: doing all of that work. However, al Gross never got
Speaker 1: angry or bitter about this. He was genuinely happy to
Speaker 1: see the technology come to pass, and he said that
Speaker 1: if in the end of the day he had made
Speaker 1: a positive impact through his ideas, that was what was
Speaker 1: important to him, which I think is pretty cool. He
Speaker 1: passed away a few years ago, actually at the two
Speaker 1: thousand one, I believe, so, uh, just taking a moment
Speaker 1: to acknowledge the brilliance of an inventor, someone who was
Speaker 1: really eager to make a positive difference in the world.
Speaker 1: We need more people of that. ILK. If you guys
Speaker 1: have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes,
Speaker 1: or maybe there's a guest I should have on the show,
Speaker 1: or someone you would like to have as a temporary
Speaker 1: co host. Someone just sits in on a couple of episodes.
Speaker 1: Let me know, send me a message. The email address
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