Pager Gateway, Release 2.03

Lotus Pager Gateway was another of the Notes Companion Products - and to be honest one that really had not-a-lot to do with groupware.

On the surface, the premise made sense - if your employees and executives had pagers (originally this was long before SMS and the present cellphone revolution) why not make the devices accessible through email using Notes? One communications channel made a lot of sense.

The problem is - this was not all that easy to accomplish seamlessly. The actual implementation for communicating to the pagers needed modems, phone lines, and a truly annoying number of varying protocols and drivers to talk to the companies - there was no standardization from paging system to system - and even the same system used different communications methods depending on the region.

It was a royal mess - but it did work and worked well once set up.

The 1.0 implementation was an entirely home-grown product developed within Lotus. However, with the IBM takeover it was realized that there was a similar product lurking within IBM's walls - and this became (if I remember correctly) the 1.4 release of the Pager Gateway.

The photo here is of the 2.01 version demo CD - this was the version created to address the limitations in the product caused by rapid advancement of wireless technologies.

Originally designed as a one-way communications tool, by this time the product had been modified to handle paging done over network connections, Two-way paging, and these funny cellphone things that spoke SMS protocol.

By this time,unfortunately, Web paging and communications had become reliable and nearly ubiquitous in the wireless world - and Pager Gateway was left behind as a product that had been outstripped by the world around it.

Just another tidbit I'm sure you folks didn't remember...and didn't want to... :)

On loan from the Alan Richer Collection