Are Fax Machines outdated now?

[Drago]

Does anyone remember telex?

 

[subaqua]

The telephone came afterwards.

Indeed , the technology race back then was to be able to transmit voice in the same way actual text and signatures could be transmitted . Porthcurno museum is a great place to spend a day if you have an interest in that sort of thing. Wife n kids can sit on the beach if not interested as it’s s nice beach. If you are lucky the cable hut will be open , I asked if I could measure the voltage on/across the ends of the cable/s but wasn’t allowed to .

 

[subaqua]

Tell me how many of these faxes that sent their copies down the telephone wire were in common use in the 19th century?

They used the telegraph lines . As above .

No . email and telegraph are not comparable .

 

[slowmotion]

Does anyone remember telex?

[media]

]View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yl6GK42UpCM[/media]

 

[Brains]

I remember doing something similar, except that I taped 4 sheets of A4 in a continuous loop and let the machine run for 30 minutes while it sent them over and over again to the perpetrator.

I once did a similar thing with telex.
Back in the days when we had to work Saturday mornings
We needed to send out the details of a ship and did not want one of our rivals who had cut us out of a previous deal to be able to react.

We made a tape loop of carriage return, line feed.
and then sent it to their telex machine for an hour.
This would have spooled and entire roll of telex paper all over the floor until you were down to the toilet roll tube in the middle and also run through the entire ticker tape roll
Thereby any further telexes would have printed to thin air

 

[midlife]

The NHS here make it such a pain to send something with patient identifiable data that fax is easy. Save file in word using password, phone person and check ID give person one time password and send. Get person to phone to say that they got it. Can take ages......

 

[SpokeyDokey]

Plus you shouldn't underestimate the security of a fax. It can only be intercepted during transmission. Whilst email can be intercepted at intermediate servers and on the original PC and where it sits on the destination email servers.

This is why Lovely Wife has to use them when sending legal doc's to some banks - they insist on having them faxed.

 

[PaulSB]

Although I retired in 2017 the company I worked for still used fax on a regular basis. Why? It was what many smaller independent customers wanted and for them fax was still king.

With our multiple retailer customer base and suppliers everything was email. Independents though often wanted fax and it was very simple to accommodate this using fax software. We accomodated their wishes just as we accommodated, and actually enjoyed, those customers who still liked to pick up the phone and read out their order to us!!

These independents used fax because the people placing the orders didn't necessarily feel comfortable with email or email was more time consuming for them.

For us the customer was the priority and there is nothing old fashioned about placing the customer first. There's plenty that is very wrong with dismissing the fax when there are clearly many businesses and people who still feel comfortable with it.

 

[Brains]

Does anyone remember telex?

I think the question is does anyone remember the Boe Code ?


Our company got rid of the fax machines (in the late 1990's) before we finally got rid of the telex (in the early 2000's)

Telex was THE major method of urgent written communication in the shipping industry from the 1950's to about 2002.
To this day the vast majority of the 1.5m messages we get in on a monthly basis are written ALL IN CAPITALS and in telex language.

 

[tom73]

Funny you say a pocket full of change. Cabinet papers from the 60's show that when the government found out the USA president had a car phone in case the balloon went up when being driven around and needed to give the ok for dropping the bomb. The cabinet office looked at what to do a solution they came up with was PM driver stopping at phone box to call cabinet office. One high up civil servant shot it down saying you need to give the drivers a supply of change for the phone. The cabinet secretary reply was this is not the case " i'm informed it's possible to just phone the operator and simply reverse the chargers".

 

[srw]

Blimey, you set up a terrible contract. Has it cost you more in line rental than you made?

It was an insurance company. A feature of insurance contracts is that they can be really rather long.

 

[mybike]

Remember them?
I went on a GPO course on how to strip and rebuild them!

I did it for a living.

Touting email as a modern replacement is funny when email itself is a 40 year old technology.

And far less secure.

And how old is facsimile ....

FWIW, the GPO had a section that sent faxes all over the world. The received faxes were on photographic paper and were sent by messenger to the recipient. I worked there as an apprentice for a few weeks. https://robertcrane.co.uk/index.php/about-me/my-stories/207-picture-room

 

[lazyfatgit]

Lots of folks still using fax where I live.

 

[NorthernSky]

i haven't sent a fax in probably 10 years. everything is scanned or take a photo and upload it

the amount of fax numbers i still see in peoples email signatures is odd for sure

 

[lazybloke]

i haven't sent a fax in probably 10 years. everything is scanned or take a photo and upload it
the amount of fax numbers i still see in peoples email signatures is odd for sure

Isn't it just that fax machines have been replaced with the electronic equivalent? eg direct sending from PC applications, and direct receipt into Outlook folders. No need for paper.