Twilight of the beeper: Today's technology offers other ways of keeping connected

Beepers have fallen out of favor as cell phones and wireless devices have become ubiquitous. But one core group remains committed to the beeper, the same group for which the device was first intended -- physicians.

By Bob Cook, AMNews staff. June 9, 2008.

Harry Steinberg, MD, got his first beeper as a resident in New York in the late 1960s. Any resistance he and his colleagues had to being reachable anytime, anywhere, dissipated as they realized what the beeper meant.

"Freedom," said Dr. Steinberg, a critical care specialist who is now director of medicine for Long Island Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn, N.Y. "This is a no-cell-phone era. Imagine if you're on call and people have no way of reaching you. You have to stay home. Now you become mobile. That was a strong positive, and a positive for patient care."

When inventor Al Gross -- who also created the walkie-talkie and CB radio -- put together the first telephone-paging system in 1949, he created it with doctors in mind. Not long after Dr. Steinberg got his pager, the insistent, high-pitched beep-beep-beep of the little black plastic box became as much a part of the doctor stereotype as golfing.

"When I think of pagers and doctors," said Emmitt Wells, a consulting practice director with Houston-based technology firm Getronics, "I think of Dr. Beeper from 'Caddyshack.' "

By the late 1980s, thanks to cheaper beepers and wider networks, the joy of paging had spread to the general populace. Doctors -- and drug dealers, many analysts note -- spearheaded the age of mobile communication.

And then suddenly, the beeper fell out of favor. Cell phones became inexpensive -- and ubiquitous. Now you could talk to someone immediately, instead of, as Dr. Steinberg remembers, carrying a pocketful of quarters and hunting for a pay phone to respond to a page. The introduction of wireless e-mail devices a few years back appeared to put another nail in the coffin for pagers. Motorola, which in 1974 introduced the first pager for consumers and eventually controlled 85% of the market, dumped its paging operations in 2002, three years after Research in Motion introduced the BlackBerry.