Recently ran into my old 'buzzer', a sub-brand of pagers that Dutch telecom providers used to target younger people halfway through the nineties. This specific model was called The Maxer. For those of you who never had or experienced this short-lived product: to send a message to someone with a buzzer you had to dial the buzzer number, leave your message on tape, and then an operator would type out your message and send it. It was one-way communication: you could receive a message or phone number, but there was no other way to respond than to grab a phone somewhere. You did not need a subscription to be able to receive messages, but as a consequence the costs of sending a message to a buzzer were quite high: about 1,25 euro.

Awaking the desire to respond
But why would telecom providers be launching youth-targeted pagers at a time when mobile phone technology was already taking off? I got an explanation from a KPN product manager during a lecture (must have been around 1996): they knew it was a dying technology, but it was an excellent way to let young people experience how convenient it is to be reachable everywhere. And once you're reachable everywhere, that awakes the desire to be able to respond everywhere and KPN had just the product to fulfill that need: mobile phones. Because of the low price for the device (I got mine for around 12 euro's and 3 barcodes from Pepsi bottles), no subscription costs, and no cost to receive messages, the threshold to start using a buzzer was low. And once you had experienced the joy of mobile technology... you were sold.