It wasn't until the two-ways that I even kind of wanted one. I remember being at the mall with a group of kids and one of the girls got paged by her mom and we had to go around to find a pay phone for her to check in and I recall thinking 'well that's stupid, I just check in when I get somewhere and when I leave, she's just carrying an annoying reminder to go find a payphone'
Once kids started sending little messages with them, I wanted one. Then they had fun colors and transparent cases. Luckily my nokia brick phone was just a few years away, half a life-time then, but just a few years in hindsight. ;)
None of my friends at that time were drug dealers, but they liked to joke they were because of the stigma.
I couldn't believe this worked when one of my friends did it! Felt like such an easy cheat lol
My parents likely wouldn't have approved but this payphone conundrum was what lead to me and my friends attempt to build a red box, which never worked well for us but we learned a lot in the attempt!
Nah, Nokia 3330 with WAP, that stuff was awesome. I built a bunch of WAP sites way back when. Slow, clunky, but usable on a phone with a tiny screen and a numeric keypad. Happy days.
I never knew the Blackberry pagers were 386s. I know they've made a variety of portable 386s (and still do) but had no idea they made them into Blackberries.
Literal beepers were still in use as late as 2012 as backups for on call people, enough so that we supported them at PagerDuty for redundancy (the API was email->provider->beeper)
