Well I'm 28 years old i never used pagers. What made it stick except being a huge target? EDIT: Being a huge target does not sound as a best explanation to me.
The earliest pagers had only one function, to page through text, and they would advance a full page when you hit any key. Space being the biggest key on the keyboard, people would commonly hit space to advance. As pagers became more sophisticated and grew additional functions (see http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/less.1.html for an example), such as search, line-based motion, horizontal motion, backward motion, multiple files, and so on, "press any key to advance by a page" became "press space to advance by a page" to make room for other keys. (PgDn was typically a much smaller and further-flung target, on keyboards where it existed at all.)
The oldest (text-based) web browsers had a surprising amount in common with pagers, plus the ability to follow links. Graphical web browsers evolved from there.
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