Incidentally, I designed, prototyped, but never produced a
paper tape printing pager in the early 1970's. The pager ran
on batteries, but the 1/4" paper tape transport and printing
was all wind-up mechanical. I also proposed a wind-up portable
floppy disk drive in the 1980's, which was summarily rejected
by literally everyone as a lousy idea. Oh, well.

As the drive would have to be connected to computer that could
power it, and the wind-up mechanism + interface would be more
complex than a motor -- what would be the point?

This was the early 1970's. What's a computah?

You said '80s for the floppy-disk drive, which is what I was referring to..


The original pager was Motorola H04ANC (all germanium).

Really? Perhaps for the RF transistors, but not the rest of the device.