I'm late to the party on this, but the fax machine is pretty neat
OP be spittin' fax
>>101575639tanum fax?
>>101575925only in ohio
>>101575639am 98 zoomer and my professor had to explain to me what a fax machine is. from what i understand, it's like texting images/documents across phone lines instead of cellular/fiber.i just don't understand why it had to exist. didn't they have computers as far back as the 1970s? just email it faggot.
>want to call company>type in number>accidentally used fax no. because the retards put it before the phone number>you are now deafI forgot one am glad this shit died
>>101576671Office computers go back to the 60s.Home computers go back to the 70s.Public internet is practically from the 90s.Fax machines were around in the 40s.
>>101576671Well, the computers in those days sucked ass. You actually got internet through the phone line. POTS, or the Plain Old Telephone System, operated using a series of tones. You would send different tones across the line to represent numbers or commands such as hang up or redial last number. There was a guy named Capn' Crunch that got a toy whistle in a cereal box and figured out that if you cover one side of it, it would make the "hang up" tone. He would go around to pay phones and blow the whistle to hang up everybodys calls for the shiggles. This is also why when you hit a number on your phone it makes a particular tone. That's the old tone the POTS system would use. Not sure if it's just a relic or if there are still POTS systems online today that actually use that, but anyway...Computers would "dial each other" and communicate using tones over the POTS line. Here's a recording of the literal sound your computer would make when connecting to dial-up internet: https://invidious.private.coffee/watch?v=gsNaR6FRuO0It was more computer-to-computer back in those days. I still think it should be. Like how you can host a minecraft server? People would host web servers and email servers back in the day. But you could buy a particular computer that could send documents directly over the phone line without jumping through internet-hoops. That's the fax machine. It was just part of the way it was back then. Everybody was used to paper documents (which I still think should exist for legal documents such as contracts requiring a signature because a hand-written signature can be validated by a court-appointed handwriting expert if it ever comes to a lawsuit. Which is what a signed document's purpose is. Fuck you, Adobe Sign. The E-SIGN act of 2001 invalidated almost every contract into illegal coercion and holds no legal weight anymore) and so people were used to using paper documents and thought it was really cool to be able to send a document over the wire.
