Also a genuine question: how did pagers work?
Was it a special second phone number that worked like a mobile, except its only function was to tell you about a missed call?
Did normal people have them or just americans with money and cops and stuff in films?
@sinvega Like mobile phones, they started as a specialist thing that gradually got cheaper and more widespread. (And in the end phones replaced them entirely.) A pager had its own number - we had a shared one we passed around for on-call when I was doing IT support in the 90s. Most had an LCD display that the caller could send a number to so you’d know who to call. Sometimes text too with the later models, but it was hard to send text from a landline phone and most people didn’t bother
