[Infowarrior] - Nostalgia: To Send a Page, Press #, and Hope It Still Works

[Richard Forno]

(Remember the Motorola Bravos?  They were the geek equivalent of Jordache
Jeans and Members-Only jackets......everybody HAD to have one!   -rf)


December 27, 2006
To Send a Page, Press #, and Hope It Still Works
By JAMES BARRON
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/nyregion/27beeper.html?pagewanted=print

Arkadiy Shats was gentle, examining the old patient and deciding he had no
choice but to operate. The surgery went fast: no more than 10 seconds of
juggling a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers.

The patient was a pager.

Remember pagers? They were the razzle-dazzle innovation that kept doctors
tethered to patients, drug dealers tethered to customers, government
officials tethered to underlings, reporters tethered to editors. In the
1980s and early 1990s, everybody carried them. They beeped. They chirped.
Or, in what their manufacturers called their ³silent² mode, they vibrated in
pockets and purses, or clipped to belts.

Now try to find someone who has one. Beepers have become technological
fossils, on the way to extinction in the world¹s rush to cellphones and
all-in-one devices that can handle e-mail messages and browse the Web.
Beepers are a leftover from the days when a cellphone was a novelty the size
of a brick with a battery that lasted minutes, not days. Cellphones were
geeky, not glamorous.

Mr. Shats, 52, rode the wave of pager technology up, and now he is riding it
down. He has spent the last 19 years in a cluttered room with a meat-locker
door and shiny metal walls that are covered in takeout menus and schematic
circuit diagrams. His job is to repair pagers, to bring these relics of the
early digital age back to life for the few who cling to them.

He works for a company in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, called CPR Technology.
The three letters once stood for Certified Pager Repair. Now the pager
business is all but on life support, and the company makes more money
retailing accessories for Nextel phones online and importing equipment that
manufacturers can use to test electronics products before shipping them from
the factory. But CPR Technology still repairs pagers, one of only a few
companies in the New York metropolitan region to still do so.

³There are a lot of people who will be using this until the end of time,²
said the president of CPR Technology, Charlie Tepper, 46. Still, the numbers
show that the end of time may not be far off. About 45 million pagers were
in use nationwide in 1999. Now the total is 7.4 million, down from 8.2
million a year ago, according to Brad Dye, a wireless messaging consultant
who is editor and publisher of three newsletters including The Paging
Information Resource.

He says the average monthly paging bill is about $9, while CTIA ‹ the
Wireless Association, a trade group that represents cellular companies, says
the comparable figure for a cellphone is $49.30. CTIA says there are 219.4
million cellphone subscribers.

³It isn¹t that people didn¹t like pagers,² Mr. Dye said. ³It¹s just that it
was hard for the paging industry to compete with cellphones.²

Once, pagers were a status symbol that demanded attention, their little
screens displaying strings of numerals (although some pagers could also
transmit letters). Was that a telephone number, or the primitive slang from
the days before text messaging? Only the recipient knew whether a message
was the code for ³I love you² from a girlfriend or ³the cops are coming²
from a drug dealer¹s lookout.

Now pagers are a punch line on the NBC sitcom ³30 Rock,² which featured a
character who described himself as the ³beeper king² after working his way
to the top of a pager business. Another character said he could not give up
his beeper because he was expecting a call from 1985.

It is enough to make real-life beeper kings wince. But Robert G. Daigle, a
vice president of Evalueserve, a research company that tracks communications
trends, has a word for what has happened to pagers.

³They¹ve been disintermediated,² he said. ³It¹s a big fancy business term
you use to talk about people who are no longer needed in business.²

Nowadays the nation¹s largest pager company is USA Mobility, which was born
in 2004 in the merger of two smaller companies that had filed for Chapter 11
bankruptcy protection in 2001. A spokesman said USA Mobility now provides
service to 4.2 million pagers nationwide.

Hospitals continue to use pagers, in part because, unlike cellphones, pager
signals reach into buildings without causing concern about interfering with
medical equipment. Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, for example,
provides more than 3,000 pagers to doctors, residents and interns. But Mount
Sinai knows it will have to come up with an alternative before too long.

³I think they will be a thing of the past in a couple of years,² said Eunice
Davis, assistant director of telecommunications for Mount Sinai. ³Not many
companies make pagers.²

Motorola, which dominated the market for pagers in its heyday, stopped
making them in 2001.

But that created opportunities for technicians like Mr. Shats and
engineering entrepreneurs like Mr. Tepper. As Mr. Dye of The Paging
Information Resource said: ³The 40 million pagers that people quit using,
they didn¹t throw them all in the trash. A lot of those have been
refurbished.²

Which is what happens inside Mr. Shats¹s little room, where patterns dance
across his oscilloscope as he connects probes to troubleshoot an ailing
pager. The metal walls keep out electronic interference, including pager
signals, Mr. Shats explained.

How old was the patient he was working on? His boss, Mr. Tepper, reached
into a file and pulled out the manual for that model. ³Copyright 1989,² he
read.

Some of the equipment Mr. Shats uses is older than that. Outside the room
are computers that can be used to reconfigure the electronic code that gives
a pager its identity. The computers are so old that they run MS-DOS, not
Windows. Mr. Tepper talked about the days when he ran a company, MetroPage,
which marketed Nynex paging equipment through retail stores.

³The main clients were doctors, drug dealers and businessmen,² Mr. Tepper
said. ³We were behind a thick piece of plexiglass and had two dogs, a
Rottweiler and a German shepherd.²

There were threats, which Mr. Tepper remembers as ³if my pager isn¹t on by
the end of today, something¹s going to happen.²

Since then, he has diversified.

³We would not be able to survive if we were only repairing pagers,² Mr.
Tepper said. ³Wouldn¹t be possible. In our heyday, we had around eight or
nine people working on double shifts,² Mr. Tepper said. ³At one point, we
had three delivery cars, drivers with two-way radios. We¹d be running
around, picking up pagers to be repaired and connected. We¹d be here till
midnight, making sure these things were fixed and out the door the next
day.²

In the ¹90s, Mr. Tepper and Mr. Shats took pagers apart and
³reverse-engineered² their liquid-crystal displays, the windows that display
the messages, so they could produce their own. Then Mr. Tepper found a
factory in China to manufacture them.

For several years, CPR Technology sold 300,000 to 400,000 such displays to
other pager repairers, Mr. Tepper said. That branch of his business has
fallen by 90 percent in the last couple of years, he said. But he became an
importer for a South Korean company that makes equipment used to test new
devices like Treo 650 cellphones.

These days he mostly leaves the repairs to Mr. Shats, who is not living the
lonely life of a Maytag repairman. But things are not as exciting as, say,
the time he opened a pager and discovered that it had become home to dozens
of cockroaches.

³I closed very fast,² he said, ³and put tape around it to keep them from
getting out.²