Pagers were the original always on device well before the deadly attack on Hezbollah. Here s who still uses them

Get the Full StoryPagers are used precisely because they are old school.

The small plastic box that beeped and flashed numbers was a lifeline to Laurie Dove in 1993. Pregnant with her first baby in a house beyond any town in rural Kansas, Dove used the little black device to keep in touch with her husband as he delivered medical supplies. He carried one, too. They had a code. If I really needed something I would text 9-1-1. That meant anything from, I m going to labor right now to I really need to get ahold of you,' she recalls. It was our version of texting. I was as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rockers. It was important. Beepers and all they symbolized connection to each other or, in the 1980s, to drugs went the way of answering machines decades ago when smartphones wiped them from popular culture. They resurfaced in tragic form Tuesday when thousands of pagers exploded simultaneously in Lebanon, killing at least a dozen people and injuring thousands in a mysterious, multiday attack as Israel declared a new phase of its war on Hezbollah.In many photos, blood marks the spot where pagers tend to be clipped to a belt, in a pocket, near a hand in graphic reminders of just how intimately people still hold those devices and the links or vulnerability they enable.Then as now albeit in far smaller numbers pagers are used precisely because they are old school. They run on batteries and radio waves, making them impervious to dead zones without WiFi, basements without cell service, hackings and catastrophic network collapses such as those during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.Some medical professionals and emergency workers prefer pagers to cell phones or use the devices in combination. They re handy for workers in remote locations, such as oil rigs and mines. Crowded restaurants use them, too, handing patrons blinking, hockey puck-like contraptions that vibrate when your table is ready.To those who distrust data collection, pagers are appealing because they have no way to track users. A mobile phone at the end of the day is like a computer that you re carrying around, and a pager has got a fraction of that complexity, said Bharat Mistry, the UK s technical director for Trend Micro, a cybersecurity software company. Nowadays it s used by people who want to maintain their privacy You don t want to be tracked but you do want to be contactable.

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