>>85492941pagers were already completely replaced in my first job during the late 90s by mobiles, which cost about the same to provision and actually meant you could get hold of someone, meaning all those people who liked to ignore their pagers and cut productivity could be identified and dumped
we were still working from dumb terminals in the office at that time
>>85500750>>85492300smartphones really kicked off with the iPhone, but there were increasingly complex pre-smartphones in the years leading up to that - offering cameras (i think even 3mp by 2004, full color screens, large storage caps etc and with data access, though the access depended mainly on the networks which were usually very unready - data was seen as a fad that wouldn't catch on)
it's correct to say that many of these were flip-phones
>>85492377you're an outlier
>>85492476it means you don't need that shitty old netbook that won't run a modern OS any more
>>85492094>>85492017>>85492880medical professionals have relatively low rates of unproductive employment because just ignoring a page can result in something that ends your career, and pagers may be a better choice because they don't offer as much distraction or a large surface area or keypad on which to get boogers and shit to track around the wards
also there often genuinely isn't the budget to update the tech, or it's left to people with no purchasing experience who can't compare the lifetime unit costs of an obsolescent technology to the lifetime unit costs of a relatively new and commonplace technology, usually through lack of data
there may also be resistance to change within the workforce, and unlike my first place, it's much harder to replace talented medics than talented salesmen, because people don't usually come into hospitals already getting better, whereas they'll walk into salesrooms and actively seek to buy shit
