Motorola Advisor

In the early 1990s, when pagers were in their heyday, the Motorola Advisor was the pager of choice. The original Advisor, released in 1990, was among the first pagers to provide alphanumeric messaging—up to four lines of text with up to 20 characters per line. It could be set to receive not only individual pages but also up to three additional group pages. It also included an alarm clock function. It was compact, measuring 18.5 by 55 by 81 millimeters, and ran on a single AA battery. Alphanumeric messaging unlocked the full potential of the pager. Often you could send enough information in one 80-character message to ensure that no callback was required. In retrospect, it could be considered a prototype for text messaging, with the same advantages of utility, convenience, and brevity. In the mid-1990s, the number of people using the devices skyrocketed, with estimates ranging from about 25 million to 61 million. Motorola made two Advisor models that could communicate on different combinations of UHF, VHF, and 900-megahertz bands (the frequency was user selectable). They offered at-the-time blazing fast transmission rates of 1600, 3200, or 6400 baud. The communications protocol was a one-way system called Flex; it was created by Motorola and used primarily for its pagers (a later version, called ReFlex, was two-way). The Advisor’s user manual helpfully suggested, “Include your pager number on business cards and on your answering machine message.” Wow. Remember answering machines? A few years later, smartphones—and actual text messaging—began to supersede pagers. Nevertheless, paging lives on. To this day, some doctors still use them, because their messages are more secure and their transmission is more reliable.