Thanks! Yeah, the take-home test is pretty outdated, from a few years ago when pagers were a thing and smartphones weren't. I put the Sidekick and smartphones down. Hopefully that will work!
Many years ago, people used the numeric pagers. Those are the kind where you pick up the phone, dial in that pager's number, wait for the beep, then dial in numbers you want that person to get, then hang up.
Those were handy since I could page a friend and he would call me or vice versa. It got to a point where we developed numbering systems. For instance, if I paged him with his own home phone number and "my number", that meant I was walking to his house (I lived a few houses from his). If he paged me with my own home phone number and "his number", that meant he was walking to my house. Let's say his home phone number is 555-555-1234 and "my number" is 32. I would dial in 5555551234 then press the pound key for the dash then dial 32. On his pager, he would get "5555551234-32".
I had a hearing friend who made a little list of things we always did and assigned numbers. He had numbers for bowling, restaurants, times, video games, yes, no, etc.
Anyways, years later... they came out with advanced pagers that were alphanumeric. You could send letters and numbers depending on what buttons you pushed. I didn't get this one. I was still using my numeric pager.
Later, they came out with pagers that functioned like email/text. Such services were Wyndtel, Skytel, ArchWireless, Agotel, Motorola, etc. They were about the same size or a bit bigger than regular numeric pagers, the display screen could show 3 to 4 lines, and had a QWERTY keyboard. Some even had a wheel for scrolling up/down and selecting. These were popular for years before the Sidekick came out. (AOL even had their own pager for a while before discontinuing it.)
