Remember faxes?

[beige_alert]

Remember the fax machine? When was the last time you used one? In the cleaning-out process I just found some documents from 1990 when a fax machine was being purchased for the lab I started working in five years later. $1500 to $2500 for a fax machine, the kind that uses curling-up quick-fading thermal paper. There was a laser-printer model for $3200. Aside from not having any use for a fax machine anymore anyway, it's hard to imagine them as exotic, costly technology rather than a bonus unimportant feature built into a cheap ink jet printer.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

Ugggh we have a fax machine at work and it gets used on a near-daily basis, and both when I bought this house and when I settled a lawsuit, both 5 years ago, they required faxes for legal purposes. It was intensely irritating.

[poltr1]

I still have the need to send faxes, usually for items requiring a signature. But I don't use a fax machine to send or receive them. Instead, I use my computer (with modem) and a scanner.

[jaelle-n-gilla.livejournal.com]

So true. Every office still has them of course - built into the copier or printer. I noticed more prominently when I was designing my own business cards and there is always a line saying "Fax". Since our "cheap ink jet fax" snuffed it a few years ago, I asked myself if I should have one to appear professional and all that... but figured any company I really want to deal with hopefully has mastered the art of scanning and emailing.

Another dieing technology I noticed is telephones with cable. Offices still have them here and there but wireless is becoming more and more prominent. I noticed when the little girl we had for visit had her toy phone on the ear and kept walking around with it while muttering :-) She's growing up without a phone chord all together.

[jaelle-n-gilla.livejournal.com]

Oh, and, remember the name really was "Facsimile" which means "almost as if it were the real thing"? Ah, yes, thermal paper *laughs* Waste as soon as you get it out of the machine.

[musicmutt.livejournal.com]

I remember the first ones that came out with the rotating drum. They took an age and a half to transmit a tic tac toe grid but they were still considered pretty cool at the time.
Heavens, I remember the days when we used bricks and string to send messages.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

I faxed a copy of an exam to schoolcraft's testing center just this Winter term. Fax machine at my end, dedicated fax line at theirs.