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Fax machines.

Mar 11, 2009
Uncategorized

Why do fax machines continue to exist in their current form?
14400 baud was the hotness TWENTY YEARS AGO, but today standing in front of a fax machine for five minutes makes me wonder what went wrong. As modems increased in speed, they did the whole handshaking thing to figure out how fast the other end could receive. Why didn’t fax machines do the same?

I’m doubly bitter about websites that make me fill out a form, print it and then fax it to them.

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2 Comments

  1. ajb  •  Mar 11, 2009 @17:32

    Well, they do negotiate between 9600 and 14400. I think there were some 28800 ones, but they never took off.

    Now that telcos are switching to VOIP internally, the endpoints have to have an
    amazing amount of cruft to detect modems and faxes and deal with them as special cases.

  2. jbailey  •  Mar 12, 2009 @22:55

    Oh, but the true hotness is that those sites almost certainly turn around and email the resulting fax to the final recipient.



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