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Comment by mherdeg | Hacker News Reader

Roughly in this genre, the 9/11/2001 pager text data ( https://911.wikileaks.org/files/index.html ) are an interesting peek inside people's putatively private conversations.

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That was super fascinating. I had no idea these existed.

People are getting automated messages of Mozilla Mac builds being complete during the disaster.

I was 16 when this happened so I had no idea pagers were used like this. Sort of how push messages or chatops is used today. To aide developers or ops people with notifications.

Amazon used skytel pagers for oncall notifications until very recently. I had one in 2014.

Hospitals and other facilities still use pagers for oncall duties. It's quite common. They're robust and last days without a charge.

When I carried a pager as an engineer at a factory, it lasted for months on AA batteries. It's been almost a dozen years, so I'm starting to forget whether it was one cell or two. It took me years before I stopped reaching for my hip every time the lights flickered.

> 2001-09-12 00:26:08 Metrocall [0134738] A ALPHA Frm: MSN Txt: Hotmail TheFreeStuffNews.com:Take a 5 minute Survey to Win $1,000!

I see that spam was alive and well back then

Lots of reboot NT machine and other IT looking pages. I feel sorry for those sys admins.

What is this?

Pager messages collected on September 11, 2001. They are also a type of communication which is transmitted without encryption.

s/is/was/

I miss the days when there was a messaging service you could buy in order to recieve text messages nationwide without transmitting your location.

RIP POCSAG

POCSAG and FLEX are still quite active, in the UK at least.

I regularly stumble on POGSAG form hospitals/ are homes/logistics places. They throw a lot of credentials around.

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