Chorus of Beepers

Beep. Beep. A small black box in the pocket of an Omaha business executive emits an electronic hiccup; its owner leaves a conference table to phone his stockbroker. Beep. A volunteer fireman in Rockville Center, N.Y., jumps out of bed and into his uniform. Bweet. A Houston truck driver has a new delivery; and across town--bip-bip--an airline stewardess leaves her restaurant table to report for duty. Bweet. A vinyl-booted siren strutting her stuff on Times Square has a call-in customer.

A portable paging device about the size of a cigarette pack, the beeper is a mini-radio receiver that puts the person carrying it on instant call from of-ficerhome or anywhere else. Short-range protobeepers were used in hospitals in the early 1960s to summon doctors. Since then beepers have spread like electronic calculators--from some 33,500 in 1965 to an estimated 800,000 today, with production still growing at about 18% a year. About 500 U.S. companies now either manufacture beepers or operate beeper networks. In most systems, the caller dials a seven-digit number that feeds into a central computer. There the number is translated into a coded radio signal and fed by phone lines to a radio transmitter that sends the beep to the designated pocket receiver.

Voice Messages. Customers can either rent the pocket pagers ($16-$35 a month depending on the model) or buy them outright ($175-$400). Some models come equipped with earphones, flashing lights or vibrators for use in high-noise areas. Doctors and lawyers often choose Motorola's Pageboy II with its computer-like Mem-O-Lert, which silences the call but records it for retrieval later on. The most elaborate pagers produce voice messages.

The uses for beepers are legion. Children in affluent La Jolla, Calif., get beeped home to dinner. Guests at Manhattan's Statler Hilton who expect important calls can rent beepers for $5 a day, then go sightseeing. By June, a caller will be able to beep from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles via satellite. A Boston narcotics peddler used top-line $300 models to keep track of his 13 pushers--until he went to jail and the pushers made off with the pagers. The users most thoroughly hooked on pocket page calls may be ... well, hookers. The gadgets are standard equipment for Las Vegas professionals.

The beepers' appeal must be partly credited to the status they bestow on the wearer. Salesmen visiting clients sometimes set theirs off manually, then announce they must leave to close a $10,000 deal. Says Chicago-based Airline Stewardess Sonja Lied: "When it goes off in a restaurant, people think I must be somebody very important." Still, the little boxes do have a knack for going off at the wrong moments: in church, at the symphony, in bed. Husbands, wives and lovers have been known to banish the gadgets from the bedroom. Could those little blurps and beeps be the voice of Big Brother? Says a photographer who has used the device: "To not wear a beeper conveys power."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.