the.com/fax machine
The printer that calls another printer long-distance just to prove paper isn't dead.
means A device that scans a document and transmits it as an image over telephone lines to be printed out by a matching machine somewhere else.
from 'Fax' is a clipped form of 'facsimile,' from Latin fac simile — 'make similar' or 'make alike.' The technology itself predates the telephone, with early scanning-and-transmitting devices built in the 1800s to send images over telegraph wires; it took most of a century, and the spread of phone lines, before the boxy office machine became a fixture of 20th-century business life.
- still legal
- courts and hospitals still require faxed documents
- security theater
- faxes feel safer than email with zero encryption
- japan's obsession
- millions of households still fax daily by choice
- peak year
- fax sales peaked decades after being declared obsolete