Word: beeps
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...What is this? Carnival?" marveled an American tourist in Costa Rica's flag-bedecked capital, San José. It sure sounded that way. All day long, happy motorists jammed the main drag, Central Avenue, while tapping out beep-beep-beep, beep-beep-beep on their horns...
Today such cards, as well as punched tape, are still used. But they have been supplemented by other methods, including magnetic tapes, discs and drums; the precisely tuned beep-beeps of the Touch-Tone telephone (whose lower left and right buttons have been reserved for computer communications and other information processing); the familiar keyboard-and-TV unit; optical scanners that can "read" characters at high speeds; electronic ears that can recognize a limited number of spoken words...
...Beep. Beep. A small black box in the pocket of an Omaha business executive emits an electronic hiccup; its owner leaves a conference table to phone his stockbroker. Beep. A volunteer fireman in Rockville Center, N.Y., jumps out of bed and into his uniform. Bweet. A Houston truck driver has a new delivery; and across town-bip-bip-an airline stewardess leaves her restaurant table to report for duty. Bweet. A vinyl-booted siren strutting her stuff on Times Square has a call-in customer...
...companies now either manufacture beepers or operate beeper networks. In most systems, the caller dials a seven-digit number that feeds into a central computer. There the number is translated into a coded radio signal and fed by phone lines to a radio transmitter that sends the beep to the designated pocket receiver...
...uses for beepers are legion. Children in affluent La Jolla, Calif., get beeped home to dinner. Guests at Manhattan's Statler Hilton who expect important calls can rent beepers for $5 a day, then go sightseeing. By June, a caller will be able to beep from New York to Chicago to Los Angeles via satellite. A Boston narcotics peddler used top-line $300 models to keep track of his 13 pushers-until he went to jail and the pushers made off with the pagers. The users most thoroughly hooked on pocket page calls may be ... well, hookers. The gadgets...