 to provide connections for fax services at an affordable price. Cue a wave of nostalgia for yet another artefact from the past – the Sony Walkman, the answering machine and VHS cassettes – to be consigned to the rubbish heap of obsolete technology. Its use in hospitals, and for lawyers, travel agents and football agents is well known, but for those of us of a certain age the fax machine was also an unlikely vehicle for declarations of love. Victorians had their billet-doux, but in the last two decades of the millennium, we had the fax-doux. These consisted of a quickly-drawn heart, a snatch of poetry, a simple 'thinking of you'. There was something magical about sending and receiving a fax in a way that emails have never replicated. When I first saw one, in the mid-1980s, it felt like sorcery – the science fiction of teleportation made real as messages written by hand in one place could recreate themselves hundreds of miles away. READ MORE: * RIP, Apple iPod: 2001-2022 * From Apple to Google, big tech is rushing to build VR and AR headsets * Iconic '90s and 2000s toys, gadgets and games becoming popular on Trade Me * Search trends show we are feeling nostalgic this Halloween, Trade Me says * Goody Goody Gum Drops: Is the iconic ice cream flavour past its use-by date? * End of an era after 26 years in the newspaper industry * UK moves to ban fax machines in hospitals, New Zealand dragging its feet There was something magical about sending and receiving a fax in a way that emails have never replicated. The fax machine mixed incomprehensible technology (that noise is a way of communicating binary numbers) with the reality of shiny, slippery paper with a d){kind=link}
Faxes may be heading for the scrapheap, but they helped a generation declare their love one slowly-printed line at a time
Farewell then to the fax, the communications engine of the yuppie era, whose screeching whirr was the soundtrack to office life in the 1980s and 90s. Its final death knell was sounded this week when Ofcom proposed rule changes to drop the legal requirement for BT to provide connections for fax services at an affordable price. Cue a wave of nostalgia for yet another artefact from the past – the Sony Walkman, the answering machine and VHS cassettes – to be consigned to the rubbish heap of obsolete technology.
Its use in the NHS and for lawyers, travel agents and football agents is well known, but for those of us of a certain age the fax machine was also an unlikely vehicle for declarations of love. Victorians had their billet-doux, but in the last two decades of the millennium, we had the fax-doux. These consisted of a quickly-drawn heart, a snatch of poetry, a simple “thinking of you”.
There was something magical about sending and receiving a fax in a way that emails have never replicated. When I first saw one, in the mid-1980s, it felt like sorcery – the science fiction of teleportation made real as messages written by hand in one place could recreate themselves hundreds of miles away.
The fax machine mixed incomprehensible technology (that noise is a way of communicating binary numbers) with the reality of shiny, slippery paper with a distinctive chemical smell. You could touch a fax message, treasure it, fold and unfold it, keep it in a drawer. They were both immediate and to be anticipated as they slowly spewed out of the machine, romantic in a way that a Snapchat of a body part or text message of “ur g8” is not. There was an extra frisson of jeopardy in intercepting the message in the office or on your dad’s machine.