Remember when you thought fax machines were dead-matter teleporters? Ah, just me, then

Video games make you healthy. Of course they do. Why would you think otherwise? In further updates to today's rolling news feed, bears are turning Catholic, the Pope just had a shit in the woods, and we have always been at war with Eastasia. Contrary to what I had been led to believe until I read this blog post, playing video …

[disgruntled yank]

Definitely

First, all praise to the author for speaking of the parties to mentorship as trainer and trainee. The term "mentee" makes me grind my teeth.

Second, yes, faxes were a pain. I remember reading years ago that the legislature of one of the US states was considering a law to ban junk faxes. The legislatures fax machines were then swamped with faxes from companies in the junk fax business, to the extent that faxes necessary to its work could not be received. It was a distributed denial of service many years before I ever heard the expression.

[chivo243]

Joe Friday!

Just the fax Ma'am! Love Devo! Have one on me!

[Chris G]

A3? That's not big.

In the late sixties as a teenager, I worked for a short while at Muirheads in Beckenham.

They made faxes for sending and printing out whole newspapers.

Their most hi-tech effort was developing a fax so that the Saudi airforce could send updated tactical maps to their Lightning jets.

I always thought that by the time the fax had printed the map the plane would be back on the ground refueling.

Wisdom is something you can only acquire with age and experience and the wisest thing you can do with it is keep it to yourself. Younger people won't recognise it or its value, plus their own fuck ups will embed in their memories with far more strength. Or kill them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A3? That's not big.

As the hubristic saying goes "What does not kill me - makes me stronger". Not sure that applies to Long Covid.

[Julz]

Re: A3? That's not big.

Hum, it's long covid not chronic or eternal covid.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A3? That's not big.

"[...] not chronic or eternal covid.[...]"

Measured damage to major organs is likely to be both chronic and eternal. IIRC some body tissues do not regenerate once they are damaged.

[Loyal Commenter]

Re: A3? That's not big.

Hum, it's long covid not chronic or eternal covid.

Firstly, that is pretty much exactly the medical definition of the word "chronic" - i.e. an illness that continues over a period of time, as opposed to an acute illness, which happens quickly and suddenly. For instance, heart failure is a chronic condition, and a heart attack is an acute one.

Secondly, tell that to my colleague, who has permanently reduced lung function as a result of having multiple pulmonary embolisms in both lungs, caused by covid. That's very definitely a permanent condition; damaged lung tissue doesn't grow back. "Long Covid" is an umbrella term for a number of symptoms, many of which are permanent, such as this one. FWIW, he also had no other symptoms of covid, and only found out that this was the cause of his stay in hospital after he had been discharged, and the PCR test came back.

[Simian Surprise]

Re: A3? That's not big.

Man, nothing like coming to the comments on a SFTW and watching people making it about COVID again...

Aren't there enough COVID articles for you to comment on?

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: A3? That's not big.

You, sir, are officially suffering from Long Covid Commenting.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: A3? That's not big.

> Their most hi-tech effort was developing a fax so that the Saudi airforce could send updated tactical maps to their Lightning jets.

If they'd printed on sand paper it would have saved having to do the background.

[TimMaher]

Re: A3? That's not big.

And the machine could be sandboxed , which is a lot more secure.

[Precordial thump]

Re: A3? That's not big.

That beige box? Camouflage.

[JassMan]

Re: A3? That's not big.

Yep, they probably used a version of those in the BBC weather office, modified to print out satellite pictures directly from a big dish on the roof. I think they were capable of printing A1 at a pinch but of course in the good old days it would have used renish or nordisch newssheet or whatever is about 2 foot wide (sorry about 600mm).

[AnotherName]

I used to live just round the corner from Muirhead in Elmers End, Beckenham back in the 60's. Later in the early 70's I was maintaining two pairs of their valve-based units at an RAF base in Oxfordshire. These were one-way-only units, a sending device in one location and a receiver unit elsewhere on the base made up a pair. They were still operational in '79 when I moved overseas.

[Kubla Cant]

Era of innocence

Never mind Satisfaction and Let's spend the night together, I'm surprised you fail to mention this February 1969 er, release from M Gainsbourg?

[Alistair Dabbs]

Re: Era of innocence

By 1969, France Gall was 21 and not my concern any more. Mind you, sh'd been in a relationship with Claude François since 1964 (when she was 17) so maybe with Les Sucettes she was in on the joke.

[Potemkine!]

Re: Era of innocence

69, année érotique....

Double-entendre was à la mode. This song is from 1966 (english translation here)

"Nostalgia is like sun burns, it doesn't at the moment, it hurts in the evening"

[Doctor Syntax]

I can't help thinking that POTS and to some extend Fax are like cockroaches and water bears. They'll be the last things to go when ransomware, power cuts or whatever take out your fancy digital infrastructure. Obviously fax would be susceptible to power cuts so it's not quite so robust and a JCB can take out the lot, but as a fall-back they should be considered for a place in your resilience planning.

[Anonymous Coward]

A defence establishment had layers of comms protocol - that always ended up with a payload of 5 track punched paper tape data. Every new IT system had a requirement to be able to punch said tape. The reason was succinct. "A dispatch rider can arrive dying of radiation but the tape will be readable".

[ThatOne]

> always ended up with a payload of 5 track punched paper tape data

I'm wondering how much punched paper tape a cat video would require...

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm wondering how much punched paper tape a cat video would require...

Six inches is probably enough for it to play with.

[G.Y.]

7!

7-track is better (has a parity-check bit)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 7!

5 track was the ubiquitous Telex tape. You could always have duplicated data - or a checksum block format for the data. Parity is only error detection - not error correction.

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: 7!

uhhh...8, sire. 8 bits, of which the 8th is parity.

3 above the sprockets and five below. 1" wide.

[Slx]

POTS, at least in the traditional sense of dedicated mainframe like hardware exchanges is gone of going.

I got a notice in Ireland that my local OpenEir Nokia (CIT Alcatel) E10 switch, that had been reliably chugging voice bits since 1981 and ISDN bytes from some later date and that has been through various upgrades and generations of software and hardware, is now replaced by rather boring Nokia MSAN and some VoIP softswitch running on generic servers in a generic data centre.

So I think the end is neigh for what remains of TDM and SS7. If they’re not gone already, they’re going in the next few years. Vendor support is no longer there and they’re too costly to maintain.

[martinusher]

The only reason why faxes are slow is that the data rate used for the image is quite low, typically 19,200 or 38400 baud. There's also a bit of page data exchanged between the stations at the start of each page that's usually at 2400 baud.

That dispensed with, the utter pointlessness of fax these days could be illustrated by the process of sending one. Like many people in the US our phone line terminates at either a cable modem or a FiOS Customer Unit. So all that laboriously generated analog coded data is digitized and sent as VoIP packets. Its converted back to analog modem sounds somewhere near the other end of the call when it can be decoded by the fax receiver. In the days of copper POTS there was an element of security because the connection was point to point but data is now connectionless and so is open to as much tweaking, forgery and general interception as any other Internet traffic.

[Terry 6]

I have to agree. I was very much in favour of fax to fax communication, because it was in effect like sending an old fashioned written document, but quicker and cheaper by going electronically. With all the advantages of both systems. But once it became PC to PC with a fax inbetween it switched around, and then it became all the disadvantages of both systems.

[Slx]

There was ISDN ‘Group 4 Fax’ which never really gained all that much use.

If you’re using Fax over IP, it’s usually a traditional fax machine over a VoIP gateway and depending on the latency and packet losses the performance can be acceptable or the fax session can just fail. T.38 is a work around, but it’s really just a hack to keep an obsolete technology running on modern infrastructure.

It’s not just the US where most phone lines are in reality just VoBB (voice over broadband). It’s the same across Europe and elsewhere.

The plan here in Ireland, for example, is for a completely end of TDM based PSTN by sometime in 2022. The legacy telephone exchanges are being scrapped.

If you’ve a fibre, cable or VDSL line here, your phone service is already VoIP through a home gateway device. However, you won’t be able to order new exchange based voice early soon.

ISDN (BRA) is also being withdrawn. They have a contingency to support it for legacy customers using a limited number of Ericsson AXE and Alcatel E10 remote units, but only for a few years. There’s no intention of supporting ISDN beyond that and there isn’t any vendor support to do so, even if they wanted to.

They’re using MSANs to replace what’s left of the copper voice network, really just as a bridging measure. A dial tone from a wall jack will be around for a while, but the default option is VoIP on your own equipment.

It’s amazing though when you consider how long the analog POTS protocol and interface has lasted. A telephone from the 1930s, with a modular plug fitted would still be able to make and receive calls over a modern ATA (if it can accept pulse dial.) The basic analog interface hasn’t changed in nearly a century.

[Mike 137]

"Era of innocence, my arse"

Interpreted in terms of the meaning of double entrendres, Dabbsy is right. It was after all the age of the Carry On movies. But looked at another way, there were vastly fewer things we weren't allowed to say (or even imply via double entendres), so in that way it was indeed and era of greater innocence than now. By this I mean that one's intent in saying (and even doing) things was much more likely to be construed as being innocent than currently, when a presumption of evil intent is ascribed to an ever growing range of words and actions.

[Outski]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

there were vastly fewer things we weren't allowed to say

As far as I'm aware, you can still say anything you want. You are more likely to be called on things that are hateful or inflammatory though.

[genghis_uk]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

I think that should read:

You are more likely to be called on things that may be perceived as hateful or inflammatory to anybody who really tries hard to be hurt or inflamed though

Give it 2 minutes and someone will probably prove my point... Here, have a pint and chill -->

[Outski]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

to anybody who really tries hard to be hurt or inflamed though

It's not that - nowadays, you are more likely to be called out for things like (and this is a direct quote from a former colleague), on seeing a passing woman "Look at that, I'd get it drunk and semi-rape it".

Are you saying that shouldn't be called out? That it's not grossly offensive?

To my shame, I didn't challenge him directly, as I was very new in post, but I would now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's not that

In general, it both is that, and is not that. I am not sure, for example, that the commentard you are replying to had that sort of example in mind. Perhaps they might clarify it for us?

Nevertheless, you are right that there are many things that are now called out, and should be called out, such as the kind of unpleasant remarks you report.

.

However there are other kinds of commentary, sometimes even quite thoughtful and considered commentary, that seems to get "called out" with rather a disproportionate degree of vehemence; which sometime makes it hard to even have a sensible discussion about the topic.

And even though in some cases, given the historically high level of intolerance and/or discrimination on these matters, such vehemence might indeed be more than understandable; it doesn't necessarily help to end up in a situation in which it is hard to have a calm and thoughtful discussion about the topic, the various differing views that people might have, and whatever balances between them that society as a whole, or individuals, will somehow need to find, or transition towards.

[Outski]

Re: It's not that

A calm a nuanced comment, thank you

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

I think that should read:

You are more likely to be called on things that may be perceived as hateful or inflammatory to anybody who really tries hard to be hurt or inflamed on behalf of someone else.

:-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

It appears to have become more common for people to see an offence where none was intended. Every generation appears to claim to be more tolerant - yet shows intolerance to anything that they don't espouse.

Rational thinking is still a scarce resource. Humans are a tribal animal - and they will show their allegiance to a group by at least lip service its shibboleths. To convince others - and themselves - of their loyal credentials they tend to become strident zealots.

[ThatOne]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

> Every generation appears to claim to be more tolerant

... towards their own flaws only.

Each new generation will castigate the previous (and after a while the next) generation, considering themselves to be perfectly sensible and have found all the best solutions to everything.

Don't you agree we're much more rational and realistic than our parents and the younger ones? Well, funny thing is, those both think the same too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

"[...] or even imply via double entendres [...]"

The whole point of double entendres or euphemisms is to allow anything to be mentioned - possibly even "in polite company".

Notice how the current trend is towards infantile vocabulary - eg "poo". If people were becoming less inhibited then "shit" or "crap" would have become acceptable media usages for defecation.

For every generation - it doesn't take much delving in history to be surprised to know that "if was humanly possible - then it's been done before".

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

I know!!!

[Man inna barrel]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

I get annoyed when people write s--t instead of shit. If you are going to use a word, then use it. Mind you, I have had posts pulled for swearing. Or maybe it was comparing somebody to a Nazi extermination camp commander. So I offended someone. I don't know what life is coming to, where you can't offend people as is required from time to time. Sanctimonious cunts. the lot of them.

[keith_w]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

Thank you for reminding me of the Carry On movies. I still fondly remember Carry On Doctor - "No Sister, the other end", when the nursing sister trainee was wondering how the patient was to swallow the huge pill she was holding.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

"Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in f'me"

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

There was also the taking of a photograph of a daffodil. Possibly "Carry On Nurse"?

[Mage]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

I was very young so didn't notice the double entendres in "Round the Horn".

[Will Godfrey]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

I got most of them - maybe my childhood was more depraved than deprived.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: "Era of innocence, my arse"

IIRC the schedule was our Sunday lunchtime listening. There's no way my mother could have understood the covert references. She said the "News of the World" wasn't fit to wrap fish & chips. We had "The People" on Sunday - from which I have occasionally used their investigative journalist's expression "I made my excuses and left".

[J.G.Harston]

Crank-operated letterpress fax machine

Needs to use Banda fluid in an unventilated room for best effect.

kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk kerchunk.....

[PM from Hell]

Car :easing and patches

I worked in a diagnostic team for ICL, we would get a stupid number of faxes per day from a car leasing company showing us what we could be driving (BMW's and Audi's usually) if ICL hadn't signed up for a company car contract with Vauxhall. In between these reams of flimsy paper would be what the fax was actually intended for prior to email, receiving faxed copies of O/S patches to fix customer systems. The joy of receiving a barely readable 200 line patch in Hex had to be experienced to be believed.

We would then need to drive out to the client site, type the fax into their system try and apply it then start working to guess which characters had been mys-typed (was that an 8 or a B) etc.

Luckily the patches had a checksum at the end so you would eventually get tot he stage after a couple of hours where the patch would be accepted. If you couldn't read the checksum then a call to the patch writer would normally resolve the issue.

If it was a critical Kernel patch used to resuscitate a dead machine then it would need to be fed in from a card reader at IPL time or keyed in at the operator console. Luckily I think I only had to do that once and it was only 3 cards which needed typing, we had to disable the O/S security sub-system when a sysadmin had mistyped the password for all 3 privileged accounts when he changed them.

Oh how we used to laugh

Beer Icon as after spending 2 or 3 hours getting a patch loaded then waiting to re-ipl a machine, then testing it at 2 AM we would always find somewhere where we could get much needed alcohol

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Car :easing and patches

"we would get a stupid number of faxes per day from a car leasing company"

The solution to that is a fax modem on which you can send a stream of random nonsense to create a mountain waste paper overnight with the occasional message saying you'll stop when they stop. Better still if you find their MD's PA's fax number.

[Nick Ryan]

Re: Car :easing and patches

Inevitably the "senders" number was faked - caller ID was and still is entirely trust based.

[Mage]

Re: Car :easing and patches

But the address and voice number was real.

[herman]

Re: Car :easing and patches

Ewww... Sending a retaliatory fax to a voice number is cruel and unusual punishment.

[MiguelC]

Re: caller ID was and still is entirely trust based.

Snigger.... I know that, I had so much fun spoofing fax numbers (as well as emails)...

1) Once we sent a fax to the office's fax machine faking the sender to be a dance school and confirming a colleague's ballet classes booking (he was something of a macho bully - we laughed about that one for months, everyone pretending to believe our colleague really had booked them)

2) Another good one was sending an email purporting to be from a PFY who had called in sick to his manager, with an "X-ray" attached proving his sickness (it was a fake x-ray of a penis, showing a broken bone - NSFW, but those where different times)

[herman]

Re: caller ID was and still is entirely trust based.

That must have been a bone of contention.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: caller ID was and still is entirely trust based.

Apparently a not uncommon injury. Usually the result of using the "cowboy" position without correct alignment.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Car :easing and patches

The old metallised paper fax machines were good for that sort of revenge. Send them a few dozen completely blank pages, they compressed well so could be sent quickly and with luck the distant machine would catch fire partway through. Or so I've heard...

[Nick Ryan]

Re: Car :easing and patches

The data compression for fax was Run Length Encoding (RLE) therefore any patches of solid black or solid white were very efficiently encoded. The absolute pits was dithered black/white sections to make grey.

I'm reasonably sure that later fax transmission encoding did include better compression schemes that coped better with dithering, however I suspect as these were not supported by lots of existing fax machines they didn't take off much and it wasn't long before email became much more prevalent.

It feels like the only reason that utter technology luddites like solicitors only stopped using faxes recently because of covid lockdowns. Their reasons for continuing to use fax were all total and utter nonsense, of course. For example, "security"...

[Man inna barrel]

Re: Car :easing and patches

I chap I used to see down the pub was an advertising guy, and quite serious about his job. One thing that got him wound up was crap advertising, that cheapened the brand. He kept getting crappy promotions from a car dealership for an up-market car brand, and eventually thought he ought to do something. So he cut an A4 wide strip out of some fancy A2 paper, wrote some profanity on it, then fed it into the fax machine. When then end came out, he deftly taped the one end to the other, and left it running while he made a cup of tea, then sat down to read the paper for a bit. The wonders of modern technology.

[Terry 6]

Re: Car :easing and patches

Even though I'm not in advertising and pretty much loath everything about it I can sympathise. Because every stupid cheap nasty advert on TV, especially the current crop of annoying shouty ones, just makes me wonder why people get paid good money just to annoy me. Who signs off on this shit? And why? It's kind of insulting that the ad industry thinks that hectoring me is enough to make me want to buy this stuff.

[MJI]

Re: Car :easing and patches

BMW Audi Vauxhall

And you know which I would have prefered?

I did car delivery driving as a summer job, take a car to another garage or take to customer.

The Audi I drove once did not impress, I had earlier that day driven a Cavalier (D Reg SRI when new), I prefered the Cavalier. The garage (partner of VX garage) seemed surprised at that.

As to more upmarket, stuff it I loved the Carltons/Senators/Omegas that I had them as my own cars when I got a proper job. More room in the back of a Carlton than a 5 series.

RIP GM Europe (but really died in 2003)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Car :easing and patches

I had a Cavalier, but had to suffer a Senator when it was getting serviced.

In those days, that thing was just WAY too big for any sensible parking space.

As "my" Cavalier was the oldest of the fleet, I got the first Vectra disel that came out and that gripped so well that I lost most BMWs at the roundabouts I had to take getting into work :).

That said, I'm back with Audi for the moment, but the new Range Rover that was just announced this week has just about the most beautiful interior ever seen in a car so I'm very much toying with the idea of ordering one in either MHEV or PHEV variety - depends a bit on what next year's planning looks like and if our hunt for larger premises comes up with something where we can install fast chargers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Car :easing and patches

"{...] new Range Rover that was just announced this week has just about the most beautiful interior ever seen in a car [...]"

Sounds like they've abandoned the USP of hosing down the interior after taking some sheep to market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Car :easing and patches

Isn't that still valid for the new Defender?

That said, why did the baddies use them in the Bond movie?

That's a weird bit of product placement.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Car :easing and patches

"[...] why did the baddies use them in the Bond movie?

Many people who can afford one possibly may have a thing for "successful" baddies?

[Missing Semicolon]

Re: Car :easing and patches

Suffer a Senator? I've had a Senator A and B, and the A was the second-most comfortable car I've owned. As well sounding nice, and having a beautiful interior. A great long-distance cruiser.

But I'll give you this - the most comfortable car was the preceding Cavvie Mk2 poverty-spec model. The cloth seats were supportive and the right size for people who are not midgets.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Car :easing and patches

"Suffer" because it wasn't exactly compatible with the size of the parking spaces in Cambridge in those days.

It went a bit too close to the definition of the main function of a car as being "a place to keep its owner comfortable whilst searching for a parking spot" - none would fit, and trust me, I was a lot slimmer in these days than I am now.

But yes, comfortable it certainly was :).

[Kevin Johnston]

International faxing

Was working on a project in Canada that was going better than expected (ahead of schedule and no errors - no, honestly) and to thank us the Project manager faxed us some money but we couldn't use it as it was sterling and not Canadian dollars...such a shame

[Floydian Slip]

Happy Memories of a first time faxer

I remember working in a large department store and word got out that I had a fax machine. The Store Director asked whether he could fax a rather important letter to Head Office. I said I would and a secretary was despatched to my department with said letter.

I asked for the fax number to send it to, she had to get back to the SD but eventually we were ready to do. I fed the letter in and dialled the number. The line connected, the fax machine started it's mechanical squeal and disembodied voice at the other end swore. We had to wait for them to hang up and for our fax to reset itself and then started again.

This time, connection was established, handshakes were undertaken and the letter disappeared inside the maws of the machine - and started appearing again in a different place.

Transmission finished, I handed the letter back to a bemused looking secretary, who asked "didn't it work then?" I must have looked more bemused than she by this remark because she went on to say "well, you've still got the letter" and the penny dropped. She had expected the letter to be shredded in to tiny pieces and blown up the phone line to be automatically reassembled at the other end - so I had to explain the basic workings of a fax.

Looking back on the shredding of data, the transmission to a destination and the reassembling is a useful way to describe the WWW

[DaemonProcess]

Re: Happy Memories of a first time faxer

Its worth repeating this old one, it wasn't just the secretaries but the management who didnt know how the machines worked. I once saw an RAF Wing Commander put his letter into an envelope, address it and then feed the closed envelope into the Fax machine.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Happy Memories of a first time faxer

Apropos I suppose then that the direct ancestor of the fax machine - albeit sent pictures using analogue voltages, not digital codes - was the news service wire photo machines. I believe one of the first photos sent over the wires in the 1930s on the AP-trademarked Wirephoto was of a plane crash, but the technology went back to the end of the 1800s.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Happy Memories of a first time faxer

Yes, if you ever watch an oldey-timey Wild West movie where they're nailing up a Wanted poster with the but of their gun - that was often a fax transmission. See link.

[Martin]

Re: Happy Memories of a first time faxer

I've told this before, but it seems appropriate...

The first time I ever sent a fax, I carefully printed out the letter I wanted to send, then carefully made a photocopy for my files, and then sent the fax - and felt a total pillock as I realized, of course, that I hadn't needed to make a copy, as I still had the original in my hand.

[herman]

Re: Happy Memories of a first time faxer

Your fax machine never crumpled and shredded a piece of paper?

[Floydian Slip]

Fax Machines and the fan heater

It was cold in the warehouse office so the fan heater was on. Staff were out doing warehousy stuff and making coffee.

The fax machine answered the incoming call, all alone in the toast office. In came delivery instructions from the stores we serviced, pages and pages of them. The fax machine dutifully received them, cut the messages and allowed them to fall in to the collection box we had strategically placed on the floor - to keep them in some form of order, and all in the same place.

Shame then, that the fan heater was facing this box because when we returned to the office, all we could see were blackened sheets of paper with the odd bit of legible writing. The stores were not impressed when we asked them to re-fax their delivery instructions.

[Alistair Dabbs]

Re: Fax Machines and the fan heater

Ah yes, applying a hairdryer to faxes, we did do that but I can't remember if it was a harmless prank or out of malice against someone we didn't like. I hope it wasn't the latter.

[Red Ted]

Re: Fax Machines and the fan heater

Oh the thermal paper...

One engineering workshop I worked at would occasionally get the drawing for a job faxed through. It would we be given to the machinist, who would then set up the machine and take the first cut off the blank. On a good day the hot swarf would then spray across the fax and turn it almost all black!

[Anonymous Coward]

My response to junk faxes was to look up the fax number of the company that sent them and reply with several pieces of black paper.

[Anonymous Coward]

And mine was to find (where possible) their toll-free sales telephone number - and fax the document back. Of course with a "resend on fail" set to 10, this should annoy them.

[Anonymous Coward]

We used that as a denial of service to sales people landing in out hotdeks zone. They were explicitly told to keep away, but there were plenty who thought they could seat themselves anyway for "just a moment", which, apparently measured in Southern Rail units, amounted to the whole day.

Until we started using the fax machines..

[Anonymous Coward]

Black stripes

One thing that always puzzled me with fax machines was when the user would use tipex on a document then send it. I would clean the white smudges off the glass and it would be fine.

Never understood why white smudges produce black lines, not white....

[James Dore]

Excellent article. “Nostalgia is memory gone wrong.” Perfect.

[KittenHuffer]

And it certainly isn't what it used to be!

[KittenHuffer]

In fact things are more like they used to be than they are now!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's why the Rolling Stones still do live shows...

[Anonymous Coward]

For certain values of "live"

[TimMaher]

Welsh

There was an eisteddfod winner who once wrote:-

“Dreams are memories of the future. Memories are dreams of the past.”

I have always loved that.

[dave 81]

A business was running out of fax paper, and the secretary dutifully called the supplier to order some more. "Sure" they said, "we get it to you by the weekend."

"Thank you" she said, "but we might run out by then, so could you please fax us some to tide us over until then?"

[Mage]

coworking

I think Gary Larson is the expert on Cow Orking.

Fax machine was first invented in 1851.

Hellscriber was a very narrow fax ribbon in 1930s Germany.

Radio weather maps on HF or satellite is a form of fax. You can set a radio beside laptop and use mic and free software to decode. There may be an Android app too.

Still popular in Japan because Japanese uses Japanese characters and the Chinese ideogram things, so a ball point pen and paper is handy.

I did IT in a company for a while that sold Fax machines when people were changing to email. Hackers would send 100s of page feeds to a fax number and indeed spam was expensive even with plain paper as those used inkject or thermal ribbon. A very few people had Zetafax on PC or Server and sometimes with 10 numbers on ISDN. Or plain paper laser copier/printer/faxes I used a Nokia Communicator N9210i on GSM to test fax machine installs. Often a new Fax bought in Ireland was for the UK market so without an adaptor with a capacitor you could send faxes but the fax would never answer a call. Same with phones; they didn't ring. Israel used the same socket as UK, but wires from RJ11 at phone / fax end crimped 1:1, but BT has inner and outer pair swapped. So imported UK phones and Faxes plugged in direct but didn't work at all (late 1980s).

[Flightmode]

Re: coworking

> I think Gary Larson is the expert on Cow Orking.

Don't you mean Scott Adams? O~

[Fred Flintstone]

Re: coworking

It appears you're heading for a whole new bit of fun knowledge. Gary Larson is a now retired cartoonist who drew fantastic cartoons under the title The Far Side which can still be admired at his website, including some of his experiments with more modern tech.

What the Cow Orking refers to is the "cow" period he had where all his cartoons were about cows.

Look it up, you'll enjoy it - the majority of his work was timeless. Search, for instance, for "Midvale, school for the gifted" or "Custer's last view" :)

[Flightmode]

Re: coworking

Oh, I am well familiar with Gary Larson and the Far Side; The Complete Collection has pride of place on my bookshelf. (The fact that I got my unsuspecting, later-to-be-wife to pick it up from the post office and carry it home is still a sore point some 15 years later...) I just hadn't heard the term Cow Orking in relationship to him. Thanks for your willingness to share - more people need to know about the Far Side!

In my post I was merely referring to the fact that Scott Adams often used the term "cow-orker" (alongside "in-duh-vidual") in his news letters for Dogbert's New Ruling Class (of which I used to be Minister of Offence; though I am not so sure I would want to be too closely associated with that these days... Times have, as they say moved on). I was assuming the OP had gotten their cartoonists mixed up; but apparently not - I stand corrected!

[keith_w]

Re: coworking

Scottish inventor Alexander Bain worked on chemical mechanical fax type devices and in 1846 was able to reproduce graphic signs in laboratory experiments. He received British patent 9745 on May 27, 1843 for his "Electric Printing Telegraph".[2][3][4] Frederick Bakewell made several improvements on Bain's design and demonstrated a telefax machine.[5][6][7] The Pantelegraph was invented by the Italian physicist Giovanni Caselli.[8] He introduced the first commercial telefax service between Paris and Lyon in 1865, some 11 years before the invention of the telephone.[9][10]

[Anonymous Coward]

Chernobyl Fax

Take a couple sheets of black card, glue them into a strip and feed into the fax machine dialing a known fax spammer. Quickly glue the ends together to form a loop and leave to run for some time. With some luck the fax on the other end will a) run out of ink b) get sodden with ink spilling inside, or c) in case of thermal print head, catch fire.

Bonus points for a free fax number and disabling caller ID on the fax machine and phone line.

Anonymous for insurance purposes

[H in The Hague]

Re: Chernobyl Fax

"Bonus points for a free fax number and disabling caller ID on the fax machine and phone line."

Or putting the fax number of their head office in the fax header.

Have a good weekend -->

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Chernobyl Fax

I do remember in the MS-DOS days having to deal with the tech support of a graphics card supplier. They always wanted more info of my setup with a 3D animation program.

There was a DOS program called MSDIAG or MSINFO, which produced very detailed info - several pages. Added to the printout of various setup files meant that I had about 20 pages of text and since I had a fax modem, I just set it off and went home. Next morning there were several error messages where it had retired.....

[Dr_N]

French Banking

Up until relatively recently French banks would only accept instruction confirmation via fax. Never email.

Hence the Psion 5's fax program and GSM fax subscription (for the incoming fax acknowledgements) were de rigueur for a budding turn-of-the-century road warrior.

[GlenP]

Re: French Banking

One of our UK banks will still only send some payment receipt confirmations by fax.

[Alistair Dabbs]

Re: French Banking

Holy cow, that brings back memories. Faxing from a Psion 5 with a pocket modem... I'd forgotten all about this. I had to send and receive faxes from a hotel room in Chamonix while on a snowboarding holiday in the 90s, just to complete a flat purchase that suddenly needed to complete the moment I left the country.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Area of innocence, my arse"

Anyone else misread that or what it just me ...

[Zippy´s Sausage Factory]

According to the internet:

The fax was invented in 1843. The samurai were officially abolished in 1867. Lincoln was assassinated in 1865. That means there's a 22-year window during which a samurai could have sent a fax to Abraham Lincoln.

Given how bad 80s fax machines were, I doubt he'd have been able to read it even if they did...

[John Gamble]

I'd be more interested in the story of the samurai who led the 2nd Maine Veteran Infantry Unit and communicated his success via fax, thanks to the inventions of John Ericsson.

There, I think I combined enough obscure Civil War details into one sentence.

(For the alt-history types, there was only one Maine Veteran Infantry unit, and John Ericsson was the designer of the Monitor. History seems to be silent on the number of samurai who served in the Civil War.)

List of Maine Civil War Units

John Ericsson

[Version 1.0]

The first fax machines were great!

I had it setup on the same line as the modem that I used to remote access PDP-11's to support our customers and every time there was a local lightening strike (this was Florida so lightening was very common) the fax machine died but the modem was fine - that was a very helpful feature for my end-user support efforts.

[MJI]

Paperless faxing

The last few years of faxing was server to server, often using Tobit Faxware on the Netware server, printing via a printer queue, I THINK it was HP compatible.

Our software would do invoices and they ended up at a customers on their server.

And more reliable than emailing.

[AndrueC]

One of the most amazing things about faxes (to me anyway) is that The first one was invented in 1843.

[Franco]

Video Games are good for your eyes

Hmmmm, anyone else remember Liverpool goalkeeper David James dropping a few clangers and it being blamed on his eyes being affected by excessive gaming? Tomb Raider and Tekken the alleged culprits.

http://en.espn.co.uk/espn/sport/story/73074.html

[LastTangoInParis]

NHS still faxing

Just a couple of weeks back an NHS staffer said they’d fax my notes to another department. You could have knocked me down with a feather. Last time I tried to fax anything was when Conficker flattened our email system.

[Dr_N]

Re: NHS still faxing

Don't visit Japan then. You'd spend the whole trip on your back.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: You'd spend the whole trip on your back.

... and then they could change their name to "LastTangoInYokohama" :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: NHS still faxing

Not my part of the NHS! We're fax machine free! Although we still have a few MFP that are plugged into phone lines, they are rarely used, certainly not for patient notes

[Anonymous Coward]

fax servers

There was a brief time when faxes didn't suck completely. In ca. 2000 I was responsible for the care and feeding of a small datacenter that included a Castelle Faxpress box. Said box had 4 POTS lines, (we set the faxpress to do outbound starting on line 4, rolling down if lines were busy while the PBX rolled incoming traffic from 1->4).

The box integrated with Novell NDS, so no separate user management was needed. IIRC, you could do automatic routing via DID lines, but we just dumped all incoming into a common bucket and had an administrative assistant manually route faxes to the correct person.

That thing just ran and ran. Never needed rebooting. The only maintenance we ever did was when the red light lit up on front. That meant that a user had tried to print to the (unused) parallel port on the Faxpress instead on their network printer, and we needed to delete the queued file.

Now if we could have convinced more users to save the faxes to the network versus printing all of them...

[Andy A]

Re: fax servers

A few years earlier than that I supported a place which had a couple of Faxpress boxes, and they seemed to work pretty well. Castelle were solidly into Netware.

They were also responsible for one of the most amazing equipment failures I've seen.

A Large Power Event had taken out the network frame at an outlying site. I reached there, and decided that the frame's PSU had died and was not fixable there, so we got a courier to ship a replacement from central London.

While waiting for its arrival (the power event fell under "user error" so no time limit) their chap asked me if I was going to look at their print server too. With no network, a Castelle Lanpress was unlikely to function anyway, but with nothing else to do...

The unit was dead. Not a hint of a glowing LED.

Now external PSUs for this sort of thing usually have welded plastic cases, but this one had four screws in its base. The lid was removed and there, in its neat clips, was a fuse. Normally, you can see the blob of metal through the glass tube when a fuse has blown.

Not this time. The fuse wire had turned to vapour, silvering the whole of the inside of the glass.

For the first time ever, a fuse blew in order to protect the equipment, rather than vice-versa.

A visit to their Stores department got me a new fuse of the correct rating. The unit was re-assembled and the Lanpress worked, and when the network came back, the lights on it went green.

[Muscleguy]

Science!

Faxes had their uses. Towards the end of my PhD in NZ I applied for a fellowship to work with a guy in London. I sent the application by courier in plenty of time. 10 days later the courier co rang. The package had been left on the tarmac at Changi and lost. Fortunately they let me fax it in given the circumstances.

Saved by the fax machine. BTW back in the mid 80s NZ had more fax machines per head of population than anywhere except Japan. Being at the arse end of the world in the wrong time zone for the rest of the world made them invaluable as tools of business.

[Sparkus]

And yet....

The plain-paper encrypted G4 fax machine, most notably those economy models mass produced by Xerox in Ireland in the mid-late 1980s, were arguably the single most effective 'weapon' supporting the Solidarity trade union and the Catholic Church in Poland and Czechoslovakia. which in turn led directly to the collapse of East Germany and the Warsaw Pact.

The Velvet Revolution was enabled by information exchange, not MBTs and IRBMs.......

[ICam]

Fax modems

This has taken me back to the mid-to-late '90s, when a lot of people were using fax modems from the likes of USR.

I set-up HylaFAX on my home Linux server with the aforementioned hardware back then. I never really sent or received faxes, but that's not the point...

I have not thought about HylaFAX for many years, so I just looked it up and surprisingly, it still seems to be a thing, although the last release appears to be Sept 18 2018 and the one before that Jun 05 2012.

[Lucy in the Sky (with Diamonds)]

October 21, 2015

I bet, that by October 21, 2015, every room of every house will have a fax machine.

And that is not being nostalgic about the past, but thinking back to the future...

[Uncle Slacky]

Re: October 21, 2015

YOU'RE FIRED!!!!!!

[Nifty]

The Fax was a valuable link between dear departed mother and me as I did early online groceries ordering and then power of attorney. She could handle a fax machine but not the internet. Ended up using a virtual fax machine to send and receive at my end. May even still have an old account with some credit on it.

Meanwhile the NHS has recently beaten off yet another attempt to make it move on from its thousands of fax machines...

[J.G.Harston]

Did anybody else use ThePhoneCompany's email-to-fax service? [e-mail]

[Slx]

I was cleaning out my old junk in the attic and found a fax machine and decided to give it a go and see if it would still work. So I plugged it into my VoIP line on a FritzBox and sent a test fax, to my surprise, it worked fine. Seems it had no issues with VoIP instead of old fashioned TDM voice switching.

[Claverhouse]

I Adore France Gall

That is all.

[TheProf]

Virtual Valerie

Downloaded the iso. It didn't run.

Windows 10 is very fussy about the smut it'll work with.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Virtual Valerie

It's only fair that Virtual Valerie should run in a Virtual Machine!

(Don't you have an old CD of Win2k in a drawer? Win2k because it only needs a serial number, no activation IIRC. Note I haven't tried to do this, so this is just a suggestion.)

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: Virtual Valerie

It's She's Mac only...and some specific kind of Mac.

I looked at the files. Linux doesn't even recognise the ISO file as an ISO!

[Terry 6]

One reason I miss fax

Complaints.

For a brief period getting some kind of sense out of a company that had screwed up was actually possible through fax when they had already learnt to ignore emails. (That seemed to happen very fast.), A fax on someone's desk did seem to elicit a response- without spending the morning on the phone listening to hold music.

You couldn't dodge a fax as easily.

And now we have the complaint avoidance system down to fine (dark) art.

... they hide or remove phone numbers and email addresses. Instead there's a web page with a tab that says "Contact us" that leads to a page of FAQs that have no relevance to anything that anyone would care about. followed, possible only after you've clicked on one of these, by a link that says "Need more help". This takes you to a generic Help page. On that page, carefully hidden, will be a contact us link. Which leads to the FAQ page...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, I have no fax "story" to contribute

I now feel depressed, as I feel that, at my age, I <should have> a fax story to convey.

I'm so depressed that I can't even decide on an icon to use..

--

I’ve been talking to the main computer.

Arthur: And?

It hates me.

--

-Marvin

[Jason Bloomberg]

"Ever-thickening blanket of bafflement"

One of the advantages of reaching A Certain Age (TM) is you can ask "what's an email address?" with a straight face and have those trying to add it to their spam list believe you.

[dajames]

Re: "Ever-thickening blanket of bafflement"

One of the advantages of reaching A Certain Age (TM) is you can ask "what's an email address?" with a straight face and have those trying to add it to their spam list believe you.

An elderly family member worked for a while in the Netherlands, for this he receives a small Dutch pension. He recently received an EMail from the Dutch tax office asking for his EMail address for their records, so that the pension could continue to be paid. I suggested that he EMail them back saying that, as a pensioner, he didn't have EMail.

[ThatOne]

Re: "Ever-thickening blanket of bafflement"

> One of the advantages of reaching A Certain Age (TM) is [...]

But you'd have to explain where you've been in those last 40 years to not have heard about it. A long stay in prison would be about the only thing credible, so make it because you savaged a sales person pestering you...

[WONKY KLERKY]

Where is Plastic Bertrand when you need him?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the recycling bin?

[ricardian]

Recommended reading:

"The Victorian Internet" by Tom Standage - "The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers"