this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
219 points (98.2% liked)
Programming
17547 readers
52 users here now
Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!
Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.
Hope you enjoy the instance!
Rules
Rules
- Follow the programming.dev instance rules
- Keep content related to programming in some way
- If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos
Wormhole
Follow the wormhole through a path of communities [email protected]
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
What's wrong with Beeper?
Nothing objectively, it just sounds so stupid to me that I have an irrational aversion lmao
(This is not an insult, I just had a realization that I think might affect you)-- do you know what the name comes from?
Years ago there was a thing called a beeper before everyone had cell phones. It was a one way paging system-- you'd give your friends your beeper number, they'd call it, type in their phone number, and their number (or whatever they dialed in) would appear on your beeper. You'd then use a landline phone to call them back (early versions of the system had no text or reply capability, only numbers and only one-way).
I always thought it was a cool name. But thinking about it I realize someone less than maybe 25-30 years old might literally have never encountered such a device. Much like a 5.25" floppy disk or rotary dial phone, they went out of style years ago and a young person might never have encountered one.
Curious if that's you?
You know, I probably should have looked into this... yeah, this is me lol. I've seen floppies and we had an old rotary phone, but I've never heard of a beeper. It still sounds weird but at least there's a reason.
It's all good. Like I said, no insult at all. There's no reason why you would ever have encountered a beeper, it's one of those things that once SMS came around everybody just collectively decided to move on from. Unlike floppies or rotary phones there wasn't some continued use for it.