It’s the stuff of most medical dramas. Picture it: a doctor (let’s call him Dr House) is out and about when he suddenly receives an urgent message on his pager. He rushes to the hospital where he manages to cure a patient in the nick of time. Saved, yet again, by the beep.

Yet outside medical circles, pagers are as obsolete a technology as the fax machine, typewriter and calculator watch.

There is no whodunit mystery in all this as it’s pretty obvious that it was the mobile phone that killed the pager star. But pre-mobile days, the pager was, indeed, a star – until 2003, for instance, the US pager market generated $6.2 billion in revenue.

The first pager was introduced in the 1950s in New York – doctors paid around $12 per month for the service. Later on, more advanced pagers were introduced – voice pagers allowed users to listen to a recorded voice message, alphanumeric pagers displayed both numbers and text, while two-way alphanumeric pagers could send and receive text messagesand e-mails. Modern pagers deliver messages via satellite-controlled networks, which are more reliable that terrestrial networks.

Nowadays, even though they’re still popular with birdwatchers, pagers are still mostly used in critical messaging contexts, like hospitals, where mobile phones cannot be used because they interfere with sensitive medical equipment.

Yet even here they are under threat, as smartphone apps which offer two-way communication, group messaging and an audit trail – like the OnPage app developed by OnSet Technology – will probably relegate the pager to their last beep.