Remember those?

Here look at this .. .. see if this brings back good memories

Believe it or not the first pager dates bat to 1950 when doctors in the New York City paid about $12 a month for a service that allowed then to page each other within a range of 25 miles. Developed by the Reevesound Company this pre-cursor to the cell phone allowed folks to alert other folks that they they needed to call them for some urgent reason.

If you've never heard of this technological wonder from years past here's the basic run down ... You had a variety of different types of beepers/pages that did anything from literally "beep" and display a number to call back to a pager that allowed you to type a message. Think of it as the slowing text thread ever.

So if you were a business person or a doctor or somewhere in between where you received a lot of calls or needed to be reached at a moment's notice you carried a pager. Problem is you still needed to get to a phone after you were paged.

Fun fact: One way pagers were passive receivers which means it sent no information back and so you couldn't track where that pager was. Try to do that with a cellphone.

Unfortunately the advent of mobile phones, the bad association with beepers and the drug trade and the overall impracticality of the beeper once become the norm were the cumulative nails in the coffin that sealed the fate of this 20th century electronic device.