A pager (sometimes referred as a Beeper) is a personal
telecommunications device used to request a phone call from a pager subscriber and/or receive simple text communications in the form of e-mail and SMS. Pagers exist as one-way numeric and alphanumeric models that only receive incoming communications and two-way alphanumeric models capable of sending
e-mails and
SMS messaging.
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1. <
hardware,
communications> (Or "beeper", "bleeper" (UK?)) A small wireless receiver that, when triggered (generally via phone), will beep or vibrate (un)pleasantly. The wearer will have been trained to respond to this signal by looking at a small screen on the device for an unimportant message.
In recent years, pagers have grown more complex, allowing for long
alphanumeric messages to be received and scrolled though (as opposed to earlier models, which supported only short numeric messages); at the same time as pager functions are integrated into some
PDAs. If this trend continues, the distinction between
PDAs and high-end
pagers will disappear.
Short Message Service allows a mobile phone to display a message, just like an alphanumeric pager.
2. A program for viewing a
text file a screenful at a time via a text
terminal, as opposed to scrolling through it in a
GUI window, or
catting it all at once to the terminal.
The best known pagers are
more,
less, pg and list.com.
(1997-09-11)