The name will live on in "PagerDuty" at a minimum.

Before mobile phones and beepers, institutions would use a public address system to announce “paging dr. whoever.” Makes me wonder whether the word comes from sending a “page” (an errand boy) to go look for dr. whoever and bring him back.

I guess now “carrying the pager” is a metaphor like “copy and paste” (from the glue used in newspaper layout).

There’s a website for people like us.

Merry Christmas!

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pager

"paging dr. whoever"

Can't help but think of that epic line in The Hangover

"Paging doctor F.....!" - Phil

Pagers are still in use. They receive signals much better (UHF) than GSM two-way devices.

https://americanmessaging.net/

Amazing range, and battery life (often weeks) as well.

Not to mention being robust against all kinds of physical abuse, which may itself be a useful characteristic for an on-call comms unit.

More months than weeks

YMMV

Policy I've seen employed was that the current on-call remained on-call until the pager was fully charged.

Dead pagers may be more fun than dead puppies, but that's not a high-prestige contest.

I think they're still prevalent in hospitals due to their reliability and higher connectivity.