The great beep backward
The pager, a former fashionable item, has been displaced by mobile phones. |
A typical beeper contains an FM receiver, a tone-decoding device, and an audio amplifier. When alerted, the carrier can access the telephone number of the person trying to reach him or her.
More complex beepers have alphanumeric capability and are able to display names of and messages from callers.
In 1948, Bell Laboratories invented Bell-boy, the prototype of BP (broadcasting paging). The first radio-paging device was used in the New York City area in 1950.
China's first paging company began in 1983 in Shanghai. There were about 30 pager carriers then, and the service was only opened to a few participants in the Fifth National Games held in the city. It is said that the first paging signal was received in a toilet of a local department store.
In 1984, Shanghai took the lead in opening paging businesses and in 1991 the city also became the first to open Chinese-display paging system. The paging business in China boomed in the late 1990s and by 1998, there were more than 65 million pager users nationwide, the largest number in the world. But the number fell to 20 million by the end of 2002, when mobile phone users increased to more than 200 million.
In 2002, Motorola, which launched the first beeper in China and was the largest pager manufacturer in the world, stopped producing and selling pagers.
China Daily
(China Daily 04/10/2007 page20)
