Everything’s changed: today, almost nobody has a 2400 baud modem, hardly anyone knows of the Arpanet, and pocket pagers are a rarity.
Nobody will ever miss pagers, IMHO. I used to have to carry one to support a trading server at a bank (Credit Suisse, somewhat topically) and I used to dread it going off in the middle of the night because something had gone horribly wrong in Hong Kong. We eventually re-wrote the server so it was trivial to restart & managed to shuffle off responsibility for it to the locals. Bye-bye pager and good riddance!
Liked your books, BTW!
Unless you're a retained or volunteer firefighter, he said, looking at the box of a thousand pagers that need programmed up and sent out.