On Call: Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call ON CALL By the end of the working week it can be tempting to phone it in, but The Register instead works to bring you extra amusement in the form of a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Orson” who told us they very much …
Someone I knew had a (land line) phone number differing just one digit with that of the fax machine of some main branch of a chain of supermarkets. At night, the phone would ring from time to time and when you picked it up you were treated to the scream of a fax machine's modem trying to connect to transfer the day's sales figure or something similar. Not something to he enjoyed in the small hours. He ultimately had a change of phone number.
I also know of an incident where a company had two fax machines and for some reason forwarded calls for one to the other office hours. Our system sent a lot of faxes overnight to the first number. One evening they miskeyed the redirect number ...
Fax may have lasted longer than most Fax machines. I remember the joy of one client when I installed WinFax on her Windows 95*. It just worked - no paper just 'print' a text document to the virtual device and that was it. Stuff t'other way didn't litter the floor. After a time it became evident that it was mostly communicating with other WinFax equipped PCs rather than actual Fax machines. Which was kinda funny but you couldn't rely on everybody having an email address.
* The delight of throwing the old fax machine away almost restored my credibility after believing Microsoft that you could run Win95 on a 4MB Pentium PC. Equivalent to trying to run Win11 on a 4GB PC today to you young'uns.
PostScript - Even after Fax was history in almost all business to business communication - it was still de rigueur to have a fax number on your letterhead and in company directories. However you could get a free 0870 number number operated by companies who then forwarded you the fax by email - having taken their cut of the incoming call revenue.
Postscript 2
Fax was a lot faster than email and ideal for urgent documents. Sending and receiving was in real time. Plus the fax sender had confirmation the document had been received successfully.
Whereas sending an email required you to try and dial up an overloaded ISP who had run out of incoming modem racks. After uploading it took a random time to permeate to the recipients email inbox at their ISP. And, of course, it waited there until the recipient had succeeded in dialing up to their ISP to download it. Which they did maybe twice a day 'cos calls were expensive and the post only came twice a day too (remember?). Not all emails got through either.
If it was an urgent email document that meant you also had to make a telephone call to get them to check their mailbox (at their ISP).
I don't know this as a fact, but in the earlier days of business email I remember reading warnings about a security weakness - messages were not sent direct to destination, but rather handed on by a "next nearest" process which meant they could pass through the servers of any number of unconnected businesses in the communication chain.
The Internet proper was set up for military and acadamic use, and because many nodes refused to carry commercial traffic, businesses had to find their own routes between point A and point B by seeking out nodes that would carry commercial messages.
Depending on the deletion policies of those servers, copies could sit around after they'd been forwarded, and server admins had access to all files (including forwarded emails) until they were deleted. Being plain text files, they were easily read.
I used the Lobachevsky song at work about 2018/9 and linked to it (YouTube) in my documentation. My manager was not happy.
I was working on some HA reliability feature and to mock up a number of servers running some services I ran the services on different ports on the same machine and gave them the list of place names from the song.
You might be describing uucp and bang paths. That was before my time, but not by much...
Its still the case with SMTP that messages can take multiple hops. You can advertise a list of servers that will store and forward messages for you (MX records) along with a preference score. If the highest preference isn't available the sender can hand-off to a lower preference server which will in turn try to work its way up the food chain to get to the destination.
Girl Guides' forms and documents are like that*.
Clearly cobbled together intended for the Leaders and Brown Owls to print out and hand to parents to fill in by hand. Or for the leaders to use ditto. Stuff like consent forms and Risk Assessments.
So trying to fill the forms in on the computer is impossible. Either literally so, because they aren't editable or effectively so because the formatting (which is horrible) falls apart.
Obviously the leaders are wanting to email the forms, because no one wants to print out dozens of paper forms ( on their own printers, if they even have one) and waste time chasing the parents to give it to them to lose (or send it via the kids who'll lose it for them) and the parents expect them to be emailed in the 21st C..
Not many of the girls' parents will have a printer. And the leaders don't want piles of paper.to file away. Or indeed to sit filling out Risk Assessment forms with a ball point pen and insufficient space.
*Mrs. B is a Brown Owl and Older Daughter is a Guide Leader
"Or indeed to sit filling out Risk Assessment forms with a ball point pen and insufficient space."
Some forms are better to have on paper with wet signatures. A treatment release so an adult leader can give permission for medical treatment on an outing might be life/death. If that form is not to hand due to a technology fail, that's even worse. If every child on the excursion has been checked against a stack of forms as they get into a vehicle, it's know those forms are in hand.
I would expect that parents will be dropping their child off at a meeting point. Forms can be handed over with some blank forms on hand for those adults that shouldn't have children. Once the trip is over, the forms can be shredded and used to line the bird cage.
As an adult male, I'd not want to be in possession of a child that was not my own without paperwork.
"The amount of government stuff where they email you a PDF that they want you to print, sign, scan and email back to them."
In the US, at least, there's a requirement for being able to mail documents via the post office. Interactions with the government are very unlikely to be to my benefit so I want them to work for whatever they are after and paper documents sent via the mail is a good way to go about it. I'll download and print the form, fill it in in my increasingly diminishing handwriting skills and send it back to help use up the stamps I have lying about so I get some value from them. I'd have to dig into my MFC since I think the toner/ink is out and the error makes the whole thing useless. Brother holds me hostage to buy more even if they may not be selling it anymore.
For some time people applying to teach for the Open University filled out an online form, which was used to generate a simulacrum of the previous pager form. This
was printed out, scanned and stored as an image from which clerical staff in each regional office for which they had applied to teach entered the information into spreadsheets.
Parkinson's Law in action.
I have to keep doing this with modern slavery statements, where you download it, print it off, sign it, scan it and return it to confirm that you are not committing a crime. Then you are good to go.
Much less hassle since I trained Friday to do it.
I kid you not, when I did this last week, they e-mailed me back to ask me to confirm my physical address and ... my e-mail address.
Indeed... my wife's driving license was temporarily revoked on medical grounds for 12 months... the DVLA insisted on using 2nd class snail mail to constantly harass her consultant with requests for information and questionnaires and would never keep us informed of progress (if any). We ended up logging a formal complaint about the lack of communication and their antiquated admin processes as well as a formal SAR as they would not tell us what they were asking the consultant nor what the consultant had replied. I used the online chat service after a couple of pointless phone calls and to be fair the humans servicing it were much more helpful than the ones answering the phones who were nonchalant and uncaring. The chat people said every time that we would get notified when there was any progress, but I found out that her license was valid again by logging on to gov.uk and querying her status TWO DAYS after it had been reissued with no contact from anyone. 3 days after we found this out, her license arrived through the (2nd class) post. So far a deafening silence in response to the complaint and the SAR (which they are meant to respond to within a calendar month -- about a week left till the time is up).
> Given a 50:50 chance of which way to insert the paper in a sheet feeder
There are four "normal" ways to insert paper, and only one is right. One out of four, which makes this 25:75 or 25:100, depending on which representation type you want to choose.
If you are creative you will find more than three wrong ways. but still only one.
I printed a paper with an arrow and text on how to insert. For most faxes the text has to bei upside down, which I reflect on that hint sheet by printing "This way" upside down. (Actually, I turn the arrow upwards and then turn the printed sheet 180°, but don't tell that the users!)
Could be worse.
Fellow student in uni had to fax something at an internship.
Took her a long time, so when they enquired what was taking so long, she said the paper kept coming out of the other end of the machine.
Talking of obsolete stuff on letterheads, back in the 1970s it was still common for UK businesses to have a "telegraphic address" on their letters so telegrams could be used for urgent or international communications. I think they were issued by an obscure bit of the Post Office. You had to leaf through a list of available words then pay some money to get one you wanted assigned to your business.
This was in the format of word-comma-placename, an example was Harrods who had managed to bag "Everything, London" as theirs (showoffs).
Being deeply immature, I was hugely amused when the office I was in received a letter from a long-established firm of solicitors in Sevenoaks called Knocker & Foskett (really). Their headed paper proclaimed that telegrams should be addressed to "Knockers, Sevenoaks". I still have a photocopy somewhere.
Non-UK readers excused duty, but let's just say this was a similar achievement to getting a personalised car number plate that spelled a rude word.
Wasn't that a lovely ramble?
At a PC shop I worked at, we sold the then-new Seagate ST-251 40-ish MB hard drive, and worked around the 32MB DOS drive size limit by using disk controller boards which let you split a single physical disk into multiple virtual drives. Each virtual drive appeared to DOS as a separate physical drive.
We split things so C: was 32MB, and D: was the remainder.
I had that on the voice line - my number was one digit different to that of a catering supplies company.
After many mistaken calls I started taking the orders. I told them our system was down so I couldn't look their account details up, and would write the order down and feed it in later. Pies, bread, coffee, hmm yes, dishwasher powder, plates, ok got it. Bye!
Since they'd dialled the wrong number they never worked out it was me. I wish I'd found out how many livid people the catering company heard from the next day.
Back in the distant mists of time I worked in the family business. To order supplies from our primary supplier we had paper forms to fill out items & quantities. Once completed I would sign them, fold and place in an envelope, add stamp and rush to the post office before their cut-off time. Mail took 4-5 days to arrive at their office and be handled. Mostly was fine except when one of us didn't watch inventory and we needed something asap.
I will never forget all of us standing around a shiny new FAX machine and sending that first order form to the warehouse. Good times!
Is that it took a long time for people to trust a "signature" in an email. I was using the fax in my MFP at home regularly for banking/real estate type transactions until about 10 years ago, when people finally admitted a blurry scanned scribbly signature sent over an insecure medium wasn't any more secure than a cursive font "signature" in a Docusign email delivered over an insecure medium.
I think it was the rise of people using email to fax gateways over the internet that finally spelled its end. What's the point of saying "email signatures don't count" if you accept stuff that people signed, scanned, then emailed/uploaded to some shady internet site that promised free faxing to deliver your fax?
AIUI in part it's because the legal status of a signed fax was established many decades ago, *and* less well known, fax machines have a reasonable lump of security built-in so that the sender phone number and the timestamp cannot be manipulated. Such info on bits of paper are good evidence in court. This generalises to international contract signings.
I do believe the legal status of emails et al is in fact similarly established, but people generally don't believe it as you say - or didn't 20 years ago.
I do believe the legal status of emails et al is in fact similarly established, but people generally don't believe it as you say - or didn't 20 years ago.
I believe this too, and blame it for the lack of email addresses that many companies seem to have these days.
I know for a fact they can be because of an office prank we played on the resident macho bully. We faked the sender of a fax we sent to the office's fax machine to show it coming from a dance school while confirming his ballet classes booking. Good laugh we had!
This is a real bugbear of mine . In the 21st century written signatures are WORTHLESS , whether in person on paper in fax or in email .
They are used as the god tier level of authentication ! saved for when its really important - house purchases , divorces , POE , etc - witnessed by other people backing it up with equally worthless signatures.
We have learned in I.T. that when you authenticate with a code or password it has to be checked against the existing copy held by the requestor - thats the whole fucking point!
The concept of "whats the password" has been around since time immemorial - yet somehow this has not been integrated into the "Scrawl your X here" system that is the be all and end all of personal certification , to the point where I've seen documents flown around the world to accommodate the completely pointless practice
Nobody's signature is ever checked against anything - they even make us write it on the back of the credit card so that when lost the criminal that finds it they have a copy !
You are using logic. Logic has no place in the legal system, because it changes. To ensure consistency over centuries, legal matters are decided by precedent - "what did we do last time?"
In the 1950s the Manchester Palace of Varieties got into a fight with the city council because they wanted to use the city coat of arms. Because they insisted on suing, the Court of Chivalry had to be reconvened after not having sat for 250 years, as the only court having power over coats of arms. First the court had to decide whether it still existed. That settled, they decided the case in favour of the city corporation.
Presumably the court is now back in whatever cupboard it was stored in for the previous 250 years.
I never signed the back on any card, despite the insistence of the letter it came attached to. Only once I was asked by a shop keeper why there was no signature on my payment card.. They still accepted the payment.
It's a kind of cheap theatre
Here in the US, you were supposed to call the card issuer and verify funds for every single transaction.
In practice, the merchant decided who they would trust and what was a high enough dollar amount to justify the faffing about.
Experiences differ - the places I shopped in the Days of Yore would always check the signature: using the same set of gestures to line it up on the slip, so they'd clearly had it drilled into them. To the extent that, more than once, I was asked to sign again when, knackered after hauling luggage around on a return trip, the first go was not up to snuff.
"A wonderful system in theory"
Well , no , this is my point , having the signature on the back of the card for the Merchant to compare to means that the "password" is given away - the fraudster has all the info he needs.
The system seems to require that only the real person can manage to recreate that signature - which is ludicrous
Its akin to having your pin written on your card , except worse
I worked in the cellar door on a winery in the "good old days" of manual credit card processing.
One customer had "see other id" in texta in their signature strip, so I asked to see other id. It seems I was the first person in the 6 weeks she was in the country to ask.
The physical document being signed might well be the work of someone else. Historically it would have been written by a scribe, more recently typed by a typist. The content might be the work of some specialist (are you going to write your own house conveyance?). It was and is the act of signing that's important. It means that the signatory has committed to what the document says. That applies where the "signature" is anything from a wax seal several inches across to an X.
When I was a little kid I remember being at the grocery store with my mom, and when it came time to check out she'd write a check and sign it. She has very good penmanship, so even to this day her signature is legible and it is almost exactly the same signature every time.
I learned cursive in third grade, but the claimed "speed of writing" benefit never worked for me. If I wrote very slowly (and large, in the kind of ruled paper they give 8 year olds) I could write very neatly. But if I tried to write as fast as I could print, let alone faster, it was a mess. So everywhere outside of cursive lessons I continued printing. I would have to think hard to write in cursive today, writing a capital 'G' for instance I'd have to think hard to recall exactly how you make one. The only cursive writing I've done since third grade is my signature years later when I was old enough I had to sign things like driver's licenses or whatever.
My signature was bad then - perhaps you could tease out what my name is, but today no chance. You wouldn't recognize a single letter, it is just a scribble that's somewhat different every time depending on how fast I'm going. So this drive to require "signature matching" on voting is really disturbing to me. I have no idea what my signature looks like when I registered to vote many years ago, but I'm sure it is nothing like my signature today. My signature today isn't like my signature today, it looks randomly different by enough that someone who wanted to throw out my vote on the basis of failing a signature match easily could.
It is crazy that we have a president whose own signature is a zig zag scribble wants to have the power to throw out anyone's vote if he or one of his flunkies decides it isn't valid. Credit card signatures and signatures on checks haven't been matched for years - I know this because I never had a transaction denied. Docusign is acceptable for almost anything. But we need a scribble that matches all of our other scribbles to vote. Bullshit!
> everywhere outside of cursive lessons I continued printing. I would have to think hard to write in cursive today, writing a capital 'G' for instance I'd have to think hard to recall exactly how you make one
Serious query: aren't the uppercase handwritten letters the same whatever style the rest of the word is in? To us, "printing" is just writing all uppercase, in block capitals - maybe changing the size to distinguish initial letters - but the letterform for a capital 'G' is the same all the time (however well or badly that is drawn by the individual).
We're talking cursive here. If you are writing in cursive, your uppercase G will be written in cursive. Google an uppercase G in cursive and tell me you think the "letterform" is the same as a block G. Perhaps you have been taught something very different if writing a block 'G' would be acceptable there. My 3rd grade teacher most definitely would have marked points off for that!
> Google an uppercase G in cursive and tell me you think the "letterform" is the same as a block G
Good grief.
My error: I had been assuming (yup, there's the problem) that whenever Americans complained about "cursive" they were just talking about, well, simple run-on handwriting like wot we done. I hadn't cottoned that you'd been expected to use such, well, old-fashioned calligraphy for day-to-day use. Great for the 1800s or a 1920s formal letter from a lawyer's office, but as you really need a broad-nibbed pen to make a florid G, well, legible, not sensible for any kind of speedy notetaking.
When I lived in Japan I remember tying to do a transaction in the bank. I handed over the form to the teller with my signature on it, which they dutifully went off to check against the specimen signature they had collected when I opened the account some years earlier. She came back and informed me that it didn't match but then proceeded to coach me in how I should modify my current signature so that it matched the one they had on record. Once that done I registered a new specimen!
That's nice for the previous century, but we should have an option to have our own digital seal. Apple/Google could easily get together and cook up a standard that would allow creating a digital signature "proof that its me" that could be associated with both digital (trivially) and analog (via uploading a digitally signed encrypted image of the necessary proof off device so it could be date stamped and archived as proof of 'signature') documents. In order to place my "digital seal" I'd have to have previously done something to prove my identity to the relevant government authorities (which in my case I already have, I have my state driver's license in my Apple Wallet) and identify myself to my phone via Face ID or fingerprint. Now yes Face ID and fingerprint aren't 100% foolproof, but neither is presenting a picture ID to the 80 year old lady manning the election line squinting at a 7 year old picture of me the size of a postage stamp and deciding that's who is standing before her lol
Yes I know not everyone has a smartphone, so this couldn't be mandatory as the only way to perform functions but it could relieve the burden for the vast majority, with the rest doing it however they are doing it today.
For voting for instance if I'm voting by mail I get my ballot and fill in the ovals next to my choices, put that into a secrecy envelope, put that into a numbered / barcoded envelope that the registrar can confirm was issued to me, and I can make my digital seal which would take a photo of that sealed envelope which would be timestamped. Then when the ballot is received by the election office the registrar's system can check that uploaded digital seal to verify that I cast the ballot inside. That outside envelope is opened, the secrecy envelope containing my ballot is removed and placed in whatever secure collection location they keep ballots. When it is time to count they open the secrecy envelope and my ballot is counted. Since the digital seal envelope was verified and discarded, there is no way to associate the information identifying me on that envelope with the ballot and secrecy envelope contained within, which had no unique markings.
Oh great, THOSE TWO making "The Global Singing Standard". Why not add MS as well? THE global signature proof directory, in the hand of the three most trustworthy players on earth.
What drugs are you taking? You should watch "Datenpanne": A German movie from the 80's, when someone returns from vacation, but the computer says he's dead. A very real scenario today, so the movie is more prophetic than ever expected. Keep in mind: 1983 is, literally, the C64 era.
(Oh, it even has an IMDB entry, albeit a bit lacking of content. Still someone wrote a review)
If you have your own private key you could sign "certificates of identity" with any number of online providers without giving them any particular information or claim over you
Should probably have some government agency holding a copy of your key so you don't lose it - perhaps embedded in a digital passport ?
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As Yet Another Anonymous Coward points out, it is quite obvious that public key encryption would mean this isn't something they control. They would merely leverage the easily accessible hardware means most people already own to make this happen.
Nothing would stop some Framework like company from making a dedicated "digital seal" device that runs fully open source code to provide this service. It would be like a cut down smartphone, including a camera and small display so you could enter a password or it would use some type of biometric authentication. Potential customers for it would be people like you who think everyone is out to get them, people who prefer separating this functionality (sort of like people who prefer a physical Yubikey over using their phone for that function) or people who don't own a smartphone but need to "sign" stuff.
All it is is a fancy digital signature that says "I authenticate that I am me, I saw this document, and I signed/approved it". Your criticism is like if I was proposing using ink on paper as a novel method of signature to replace wax seals and you said "oh great handing a monopoly to Bic and International Paper".
Digital signatures - kinda like the digital signatures that have been around for three decades now? Well, three and a half decades.
PGP, OpenPGP, GnuPG.
Which have been ignored, AFAICS, because Microsoft etc didn't want to support anything as democratic in order to sign emails, leading to the idiotic situation we have now where plain old emails, trivially spoofable, are somehow given legal standing.
> . In order to place my "digital seal" I'd have to have previously done something to prove my identity to the relevant government authorities
Why involve the government? The "web of trust" is essentially the same system that has been working now for a few hundred years, where contracts are witnessed and cosigned in person. Except the signed PGP keys are reusable, you don't have to keep calling in your acquaintances, known to both parties, to the office to give yet another countersignature.
The scheme even allows for sensible uses, such as being able to generate new key pairs so that you can create a provable* "we signed that" for a contract without being forced to use the same key for every single use.
And, if necessary, some of those keys can be signed by a government department, although, of course, those should only *need* to be used when dealing at governmentally controlled points, such as passport control. No need to have government signed keys when all you want to do is pay for an Apple service: a bank can do that, to confirm you are a customer.
* Barring loosing control of your private keys, which is the same risk no matter who holds them.
> PGP, OpenPGP, GnuPG. Which have been ignored
Yeah, the reason is that the *PGP keyserver has/had no verification that you are you. Depending on how prominent you are you have one or a few actual YOUR fingerprint(s), but factor 10 or over 100 who are listed on those various keyservers, but are not you. They simply forgot that part early on.
I am non-prominent enough to have no fakes at all, for the obvious reason that I am not important enough to be faked.
> *PGP keyserver has/had no verification that you are you
Aside from the intentional lack of any kind of centralisation (as "keyserver" rather implies), at base PGP et al verifies that "I am the same entity you have been corresponding with". The End. And that is enough.
For any given public key, to add "verification", e.g. that "this entity is known to us and we've done whatever we feel the need to do verify this entity's bone fides", the "us" simply signs the key. The web of trust.
There is really no need[1], in the vast majority of transactions, to demonstrate anything more. Certainly not for a single signature that demonstrates "you are you" and that is the same "you" across all these transactions, a "you" can be tracked back and identified without your consent.
> They simply forgot that part early on.
They didn't forget anything. Except to try and create a "one and done" digital signature, yours for life and centrally controlled.
[1] "They" (mostly Facebook et al these days) might *like* to have more, but there is no functional *need* for it, certainly not for any function that benefits you rather than "Them".
The last time I sent a fax was in 2017. Was an agency contractor and another new start wasn't allowed to submit her timesheet by any method other than fax or post (the rest of us used to sign the sheet, scan it and then email it). She wasn't really technically literate and all and asked if I could help her get it sent on the Friday, so off to IT we went to see if they had a fax machine somewhere or indeed the capability to send it.
I was in my late 20s and had used them before, but the lad in IT on the desk that day looked at me as if I'd just asked him for a spare BBC Micro or PC-XT (other superannuated computer hardware is available). He did however know of one sat in a store cupboard, so we dug it out and plugged it in.
He stayed around to watch me set the machine up, dial the number in and scan the fax with what appeared to be baffled curiosity. We left the machine set up and plugged in on a spare table, and came in on Monday to find several sheets of spam in the out tray.....
On the subject of the BBC Micro, I was surprised to see one behind some glass in the Museum of Science and Industry, in Manchester.
"Oh wow, that's what I learned to program on!" I excitedly informed my partner.
"You learned to code on something that's in a museum?" she mockingly asked.
*sigh*
Half the things I saw in the Science Museum
Louis Marx 60's toy Dalek.
Dinky Thunderbird 2.
Austin Mini
Isetta Bubble Car.
BBC Model B
That's not including the things I never owned or worked with or on, that were also on display.
Icon - Happy Birthday Me
Those were the days. Do you remember that the floppy drive used two 256 byte pages for buffering. So you could switch the display to mode 7 (teletext) to do IO and then move a precious 512 bytes of instructions back into the buffer area before switching to a better mode. The Blessed Sophie gave us this gift.
I'm typing this on a machine that has 256GB of RAM, 24 CPU cores, some NVMe drives and ....
The doctors are the very very last to adapt.
Even in Australia, I recently watched the receptionist sending a fax. I assume they use some sort of fax over (vo)IP as there wouldn't be a lot of POTS copper left in service (if any.)
I suspect solicitors wouldn't be far behind the medicos. It took a global pandemic to get the legal profession to abandon in person conveyancing settlements for online settlement.
Was still 'recommended' as a notification method for medical devices.
I could have argued with the FDA and my ISO auditors that an email was sufficient, or that an online fax-email gateway was the same thing.
Or I could have found an old MFP with fax and plugged it in. Hardest part was getting a 'real' phone line installed.
Yes, my local medical centre faxes referrals printed out by my doctor in his office to specialists; when asked about this, the receptionists told me that most specialist's offices only accept faxes or snail mail! (Mind you the specialists all have laptops thay take all the consulting notes on...)
When I worked at the Bank of England 4 years ago their fax service was still considered part of the critical national infrastructure. We still ran a fax server and had well in excess of 200 accounts on there some of which were in use daily. We tried to move to a cloud based solution whilst i was there, but because of it's status we had to keep it in house on a creaking server with myriad incoming lines!
When we stopped using Fax at a company I worked for, I purposely placed the shredder under the (page by page - not paper roll) fax to get rid of the spam. About 6 months later, the exec who refused to let us turn off the fax, complained that he was not getting updates from the Golf Club.
For several years, the company I worked for would receive a fax from a bank in either Norway or Sweden (I forget which), containing some financial data. We'd then enter the data into our system and file the fax away in a filing cabinet.
The fax machine used thermal paper.
So you guessed it, several years later when moving office, we found we had a large filing cabinet stuffed full of BLANK sheets!
A good twenty years ago, as a graphic designer, I had a walk in client come in with an almost completely faded fax that was critical for a court case. You can imagine the panic they would have had. And it took the very nth degree of the sensitivity of a graphic reproduction quality scanner to be able to detect and record the faint image, which I then enhanced further. It wasn't perfect but the client was happy and said that it merely had to be legible for the barristers to read.
They could have so easily been absolutely hosed.
Epson WF-2950-DWF. Currently £64+ at Amazon UK. Does print/copy/scan, also proudly advertises its fax capability.
In 2019 I did some work at a device manufacturer that used fax multiple times a day to communicate with its subsidiary in Japan.
This happens because the legal system in most countries tends to wait a few decades to decide whether any new technology is admissible as evidence in court - not entirely unwise given such delights as "your honour, I am not a cat!" and early examples of AI-generated legal sumissions citing fictitious case law.
... what was telex like?
Now, that IS a blast from the past.
I learned to use a telex machine for the first time ca. early 1980.
A quite hefty, noisy and seemingly indestructible Siemens machine that had been in use for quite a long time.
Mechanically inclined fron an early age, I found it fascinating to see how it worked.
Once you got the hang of it, it was easy enough to use, punching the tape first and checking it with a test print before actually sending the telex.
Many times, the tape was saved and archived.
The engineering outfit that owned the place had just one or two fax machines for the board secretaries but (as I recall) for the important things telex was preferred.
Particularly when it was overseas comms with their home office or partners.
.
A telex machine, and the failure of its bell to ring was a key part of the plot of the film "The Andromeda Strain"
I've still got my old daybooks from the 80's, several Telex "numbers" in them, used when I was working at a Ford Engine plant in Cleveland, Ohio.
Telex appears to still be in use in some places. We do a lot of imports, sometimes we get original bill of lading documents sent to us from the shipper by courier which we have to forward to our UK agents so goods can clear customs, but other shipments they don't need the originals because there has been "telex release".
I joined the RAF in 1959 as a 16 yr old Boy Entrant, training to be a Telegraphist. We were taught to type on a Creed 7b at 45 wpm, receive/transmit Morse at 21 wpm, and to read Murray code (5 unit code). The RAF were still using Creed equipment (at 75 bauds) when I was demobbed in 1973.
Televising a fax machine printing out the footie scores would be - less dramatic. Compare:
(clunk clunk) Bolton Athletic (pause - clunk clunk) 2 Accrington Stanley (pause) (pause) 3
against
Bzzzz - is that going to be a G? Godalming Town? Bzzzzz bzzzzzz bzzzzz - P! It must be a P! Perth versus Arsenal?
Ok, that sounds like it could have you on tenterhooks, but consider how that line ends:
Bzzzz bzzzz - yes, yes, we know, we KNOW, get on with the next one - bzzzz bzzzzz bzzzz as it finishes the descenders on the 'g' and 'y'.
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We used to get faxs sent to us to show where the work points should be out in the field.
The really important points with all the written instructions were highlighted with one of those florescent marker pens.
When we received it from the fax machine, it was totally black and unreadable.
This continued for months despite the sending office staff being repeatedly told..
Almost as bad as the huge number of mainstream websites that seem to think medium grey text on a slightly lighter grey background is a good idea.
Even worse are online forms where the background colour, box colour and text coiour are all very close versions of grey.
I miss black text in white boxes with black borders and a background of some completely different colour so I can actually see where fields are and what I'm typing.
Throwback Friday to when I started my career in education in ~2006. Whilst I've a lot of time for teachers and think they get a bad deal, like any profession a small number have a warped sense of their own infallibility borne from the constant power/knowledge imbalance between them and the kids they spend all day teaching.
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One particular moment that stood out was a senior leader who deigned to gift the children with his teaching* once a week. We'd been hard at work, with YouTube in its infancy, building an internal media server. Every classroom had an interactive whiteboard but they still carried around a VCR or used DVDs in class. With great success, we'd thrown together a dusty server donated from another school with a load of salvaged drives in a very paranoid RAID and offered a digitising service where we'd cut the bits of VHS tapes or DVDs used to DIVX AVI that they could instantly load. Cleaned, tracking (for those who know, it's time for your medication) perfected and cut to the useful bit. All we asked was that resources were thrown to our techies a week or so before use and they'd be permanently available.
This senior leader came to us with zero notice nine minutes before the start of his lesson for the VHS, (wanting a 20 minute segment by the start of his lesson) and was indignant that we were unwilling to digitise his footage. We dropped what we were doing to help with the VCR, plugging it in to the RCA on the wall and changing the input on the projector for him. He called us back 10 mins in to the lesson however as it wasn't working. Whilst he stood at the front making barely veiled sarcastic comments to a group of ~30x 12yo about how poor the IT was in this school and nothing ever worked, I took a look at the problem without rising to it. It took me around 30 seconds to realise he'd not put the VHS in the VCR. I advised him of this professionally, quietly at the front of the room, but unfortunately even the biggest classroom is just not far enough away for the kids in the front row to go unaware.
They started squawking and shrieking it at full volume and the lesson descended in to chaos. As he'd pulled rank and made sure it was the closest classroom to his office during timetabling (ejecting another teacher to the opposite end of the not inconsiderable site for this single period) he was also closest to the other senior leaders. Moreover, they were covering the roving extreme-behaviour function and had to come help him after a while because he couldn't get the kids to calm down after they decided just how inept he was. The best part? He was the senior leader *in charge of behaviour* in the school, and the Headteacher got a great view of his abilities in-role.
* It was common around the staff for them to pity the kids who endured this. Those who've done education (if there are any among us) will recognise immediately: somewhere 3/4 to the end of their career; done well but lost interest in staying current whilst expecting others to do so; was never a great teacher anyway, but increasingly insular; now senior and believes his workload in one lesson per week made him "one of us" but didn't understand that other staff couldn't put that level of time in to their classload; and "performative" to the max in terms of "...I've managed to fill in the data sheets..." or whatever halfwitted short-form target was being pushed.
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Bonus story
There was another similar tech incident. I was at my desk with a polite queue of students waiting their turn to be seen and helping one get their coursework back. Someone slammed open the outer door to the IT area, just out of sight and I was just about to call the behaviour team to come help when I was surprised to see a teacher hammer through the door and storm to the desk. Before I had a chance to process what was happening, and despite that I was mid flow with a student, the teacher *threw* a 3.5'' floppy (again, it's time for you to stretch your knees) such that it bounced clear off my desk and hit me in the sternum. This was followed with her bellowing "I PUT THE INTERNET ON THIS DISK AN WHEN I GOT HOME IT DIDN'T WORK". I couldn't conceptualise this quickly enough before the tirade continued "I COULDN'T DO MY PLANNING AND IT RUINED MY EVENING. I WASN'T READY WHEN I GOT IN THIS MORNING." I was just about to open my mouth to respond when she turned tail and stormed out, slamming the door behind her. I apologised to the students who had been queuing politely and cleared the issues, checked the disk, then went to find her.
She was incandescent in the staff room. It took some time to explain to her how a shortcut icon worked, and why it would have worked here, but didn't negate her need at home to get an internet connection of her own. Moreover, to set some professionalism boundaries and talk about the example set for the students. I didn't get an apology, but I didn't have to deal with that again.
One of our teachers did law before switching horses. If you really pissed him off, he could cross examine you like a combination of Perry Mason and R. Lee Ermey.
It would start with "Really. You put the whole internet on this disk....?" and in 15 minutes he'd have you questioning if you indeed belonged to the phylum Chordata or if you had not evolved past the slime mold stage. Without ever raising his voice or swearing.
I'm with the user on this one.
Many photocopiers have fax capability.
At one project, for a large pharmaceutical company where I was cutting over to a new phone system within the last twenty years, nearly all the photocopiers were set up to send faxes as well as do regular photocopying - and there were very few standalone fax machines.
So anyone used to working in that enviroment would absolutely expect to walk up to a photocpier and expect to be able to send a fax.
I would add that fax may be old technology, but it has many applications for various reasons still today. Put a piece of paper in one end dial a number and a piece of paper looking the same comes out the other end in real-time without needing to type anything, nor open any apps and with confirmation that the document has arrived succesfully. Sometimes low tech is easy tech.
The last copiers I worked with in a real office setting (rather than my back garden) all had fax because they were leased and the lease company provided the fax relay as a cloud service. Documents could go direct to fax from computer desktop, or by scanning on the copiers. I don't know how faxes were received. I never ever sent or received one.
And the Christmas party wouldn't be the same without somebody scanning their bare arse and faxing it off to someone.
I can't remember the last time I've seen a photocopier that only copies. They are all (at least the ones I encounter) jack of all trades. They used to be copiers only because making them also able to print was costly - you needed basically a whole computer in there to understand postscript, do ethernet/TCP-IP and so forth. Today that "whole computer" able to do that stuff costs about $10, or whatever the price of the lowest end Raspberry Pi is (even though today's Pis are massive overkill for making a copier a printer)
So any "copier only" devices anyone has seen for the past decade plus are undoubtedly capable of scanning and printing, they just might have disabled that functionality if they have enough need for copying that they want to make sure people printing doesn't get in the way of that. Or maybe "printing" is extra cost and they decided they already had plenty of printers so leaving out the licensing to make it print saved a few bucks. But it is still in there. No one is going to make a copier only.
Adding fax capability is likewise simple, and cheap enough at the price for one of those cubic meter sized "copier room copiers", but that may be disabled because "we don't need that anymore" or "we switched our office phones to VOIP and don't have an analog line available where this 'copier' lives".
I remember an ad on tv, probably during the Superbowl (due to the content) about faxing a football from New York to California. The ad was for either GTE or AT&T, if I recall.
Many of my clients need two network drops next to their copiers. One patched directly into the copier so it can be used as a network printer/scanner. The second is patched to an ATA (analog telephone adapter) to provide a telephone line for fax.
Outside of medical field, faxes are still used in government, law enforcement, and legal fields. The “secure” point to point basis is the key. Even if you change the time/date code on your device, logging at the telco will not change and will be found out during discovery if/when the lawyers get involved.
With the fax gateway software i've used, adding "fax" ability was as easy as either printing to a virtual printer, which would trigger a destination pop-up box where you select from a phone directory, or by putting a phone number in the To: field of your email. The email would become your cover page and attached documents would be expanded into pages. To save money, there used to be "back office" services that checked to see if there was an email associated with the phone number you entered so it could be re-routed as an email. At the destination, OCR would attempt to determine the recipient, and if it failed, it would go to a designated secretary.
When I joined the organisation, we authorised deployments by fax; you ended up with a stack of signed and counter-signed papers at the end of the week for stuff going out over the weekend; you could be reasonably sure that everybody that had to do something knew they had to do it; we moved to digital approval and now have to hold meetings to be certain everyone involved actually knows what they have to do. ... Progress?
When I joined the organisation, we authorised deployments by fax; you ended up with a stack of signed and counter-signed papers at the end of the week for stuff going out over the weekend; you could be reasonably sure that everybody that had to do something knew they had to do it; we moved to digital approval and now have to hold meetings to be certain everyone involved actually knows what they have to do. ... Progress?
In addition to the numeric inputs others have mentioned, I've seen them for two other reasons. One was a way to have user-controlled print jobs but before authenticating them with an employee badge became popular. People would be assigned access pins and the keypad was there to get those. Probably didn't do much for security, but I didn't come up with the system. I've also seen copiers and several other devices adopt a number-based menu system so instead of lots of buttons, they show you options and you press the corresponding number, thus allowing them to get by with a smaller control panel.
One thing about fax - it required nothing more than a working POTS line and power giving it a survival power approaching that of the cockroach. Obviously it wouldn't work in a power cut but it wouldn't be prone to some random BGP error on the other side of the planet or finger trouble in a data centre in Virginia.
Well yes, in the sense that they had battery backup of their own, but modern internet exchanges also tend to have that, the things that don't have that could add it, and if any link in your chain didn't have a battery, had a hardware failure, or the power outage went long enough to drain it, it would break just as much. I recently lost power briefly at my house, and connecting my router to a battery worked just fine getting my internet service back up because, although this was run by people who don't run POTS equipment at all, they also have heard of and bothered to buy batteries.
arguably the same thing.
I learnt early on that you could give big boss a fair bit of stick but never give his PA, secretary, etc any grief as unlike her employer she has an attention span infinitely greater than his five minutes. She will never forget (nor forgive.)
I would have told her "Sorry, it was a fax machine but the fax function is broken so it's now only used for photocopying — you weren't to know."
She knows you are lying but appreciates the thought.
As I've said here before, never ever cross the holy trinity of secretaries, storespeople/technicians and security
Or the corollary, if you get on their good side (and ideally be owed a favour or three)), you can get absolutely anything done in the building.
In both academia and industry, there are those who think they run the place, and those who actually do on a daily basis.
I'd just go with the truth but say it's someone else's fault, maybe mine. "That's just a copier. The fax machine is over here. They do look very similar, I understand why it wasn't clear. Perhaps we should label them." That way, I don't have to take the risk that the person doesn't appreciate the covering lie and I also avoid the risk that they believe my lie, repeat it to someone else, and don't like the result.
Email killed faxes in the late 1990s (except in Japan)
and except in slow moving dinosaur businesses and gov deperatment or places where thery decreed the old trusted method "safer" like lawyers and and finance offices.
so basically everywhere
The stupiderest ever error I ever saw was on a fax machine in uk gov office in about 2010. It had a little LCD screen which had some totally meaningless error code on it . turns out after much pdf manual downloading and poring it meant "out of paper"
And Another Thing! nine out of ten times I had to go out to one of these machines because someone claims it wasnt working it was because they had the wrong number , or the other end wasnt active , the amount of times I tried to explain the simple phone call like concept never worked . I stopped short of just screaming "Its a phone call FFS! they need to answer it! " at them though.
Brother brand, a few years old,for my daughter, who needed a printer, and got a scanner and copier as a bonus. TFM spends a good chunk of its length talking about the fax function. She will, of course never use the fax function...no POTS here any more. Works quite nicely as a printer, scanner and copier though!
Brother, as you may or may not know, sells a line of basic consumer printers which do not conform to the HP business model, and so, was my first choice when I went looking for a used printer for her. This one came from Goodwill ($75), and the counter said 300 pages. Toner was still there, and drum had some toner stuck to it, but cleaned up nicely with a few doses of isoprop.
English Football still relies on a fax to complete a transfer, or at least it did up till last year. I’d check if it still does but honestly cba. Sky Sports love it, and it gave rise to Leicester missing out on a new signing a few years ago when the fax landed at FA hq 14 seconds after the deadline. The appeal failed too.
Rex and Tim, the Delightful Duo!
One of my favorite shows, and one of my favorite episodes.
The Secret Life of Machines - Faxes
Enjoy!
SWMBO worked for local government social services for over 20 years. Many documents required to be wet signed and faxed. This was still being done when she left the job in 2019.
My company used to receive purchase orders by fax up until about 2010, and I remember that our fax machine also had the ability to make photocopies (plain A4 paper).
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A story:
We had a direct dial phone number to the office. One day the phone rang and I picked it up to be greeted by the screech of a fax. Assuming it was a wrong number, I put the phone down. About 5 minutes later, and another fax call, and then a third one. It then stopped for a week. The following week, the same three fax calls. This went on for a couple of months. I then did a last number check and found that it was a relatively local dialing code.
After some internet research and i number of phone calls I found that the number belonged to the local water company. Following up with the company I discovered that it was an automated fax call from an unmanned water treatment plant reporting the various operating parameters to the mothership. Someone had programmed the phone number in with one wrong digit.
The calls ceased in due course.
Email killed faxes in the late 1990s (except in Japan) though manufacturers kept including fax functions in multifunction printers (MFPs) for years
In December 2018 Health Secretary Matt Hancock announced a ban on buying new fax machines, setting a complete phase-out deadline for March 31, 2020.
Yet in 2026 the NHS still uses a tiny number of fax machines for everyday tasks, though they are nearly completely phased out. Health Secretary Wes Streeting confirmed that only three hospital trusts still rely on them for daily operations, while others keep some in storage as emergency backups during cyber or IT failures.
Fax is dead. Riiiiight.
Phone convo only last week:
Me: I need a referral to specialist X.
Primary care GP: I need the NPI
Me: blahblahblah
Primary Care GP: And the address of the office.
Me: Blahblablah
Primary care GP: And the office fax number.
So it would appear that the entire medical profession in NY hasn't received the No Fax, er, fax.
Law offices still use it hereabouts too.
When I started work in AUS in the late 80s, long before email, faxes were the goto for speedily sending documents. Except to Mexico and ... Japan(!), where we had to fallback to telex. It was the only time it was ever used, except to receive the occasional spam.
There used to be community college courses in office machinery, systems and workflows. Companies would only hire office staff that had taken one of those course or had enough experience working in an office. Somebody not knowing that the photocopier is not a fax machine is a problem that gets close to fixing documents by painting tippex on the computer screen.
Yes, they can look the same, but there will be some sort of selector for Scan/Fax/Copy somewhere obvious on the panel.
Couple of memories here triggered by the mention of fax machines.
Back in the 90s I worked for a Stockbroking firm that still had a Telex machine ! We had one client in India who would send through orders on it and when it burst into life, people would nearly have a heart attack.
We did have someone who was p!ssed at the company do the old looped page through the feeder to use up all the paper in the fax but fortunately it was a plain paper fax, so once the tray ranout, it just held the job in memory. When we came in on Monday, we killed the job and let it print out the next queued jobs.
Recently had to set up a fax machine for a doctor's surgery, when we asked why they wouldn't use an online service they said they preferred to use the device they had so they could confirm that faxes had gone through :) Because it was connected to a 3CX pbx we set it up to deliver received faxes as emailed pdf files .
"Email killed faxes in the late 1990s (except in Japan)" ... yeh, you bet!
Last Friday i was called from the assistant manager's office, to fix the DAMN FAX! Because no receipt was, well, received.
Well, it's Romania, this is natural somehow, as it's said that we have a 50 years delay...
Many mfrs include fax capability in the "5-in-1" machines to this day. Faxes are still preferred the method of transmitting prescriptions betweren doctors and pharmacies in many countries where (apparently) they managed to update their regulations to admit fax transmitssion but are still working on the protocols of e-mailing the same data.
Yeah I really wish email had killed faxes in the 1990s. You still don't have to look too hard for thermal paper rolls for those fax-phones that were once all the rage.
For a brief glorious period it was possible to fax a senior manager, or a head office. And an acuall physical lette rwould appear on the manager's desk. Being a physical object, rather than an email it tended to get attention.
The some b****d came up with a way to send the fax messages digitally directly to the PC inbox.To be ignored seamlessly
