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Early pagers only provided an audio notification, a bleep or series of bleeps, to indicate that you had been paged. The recipient then had to telephone the control/call centre to collect the message. Later pagers used text messages to provide the recipient with more information.
Later models included the ability to send messages in a two-way fashion and even included the ability to send email.
Pagers are now going out of fashion due to the widescale availability of mobile phone and SMS based text messaging. However, they retain their usefulness for distributing alerts to large numbers of people at the same time.
Interestingly pagers are still in use today where mobile phones typically cannot reach. A good example is deep within a hospital complex where cellular coverage can be problematic.
Common paging protocols include: FLEX, ReFLEX , POCSAG , Golay and NTT.