6 ms·
A nit, the telephone and fax machine developed more or leas in parallel, and the first working fax predated the first telephone by 11 years!
by flatline 6y ago
A nit, the telephone and fax machine developed more or leas in parallel, and the first working fax predated the first telephone by 11 years!
- techbio 6y agoThis message is a telegram.
- RugnirViking 5y agoInteresting! Could you expand a little on what you did?
- philistine 6y agoThey were sending drawings through telegram lines for newspapers during the American Civil War. Thus, the fax is older than the phone. But in terms of general population use, of course most people encountered a phone before they encountered a fax.
- r3trohack3r 6y agoSource?
- theodric 6y agoGoogle "fax machine history." This is incredibly trivial to verify.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- aksss 6y agoInterestingly, you can still send a telegram.. https://www.itelegram.com/ https://www.itelegram.com/ I guess these guys took over all the telegram infrastructure of Western Union in 2006.
- kwhitefoot 6y agoTelegrams were always expensive but the price now is outrageous. I followed the link and chose Norway as the destination country and was told that it would cost GBP 22 + 67p/word! Even worse for Mexico: GBP53 + 67p/word. It's cheaper to send flowers with a card!
- ant6n 6y agoThat doesnt sound like fax. Or better, if you include this and fax together, you’d have to describe it as a generic technology that allows sending images remotely. Which may actually survive the telephone.
- monocasa 6y agoBacking up the original point of the parent post's spirit, I actually see fax lasting longer. It's special cased in a lot of regulatory structures as 'secure' and has quite a bit more use than the HN crowd might think.
- mickael-kerjean 6y agoFax is the cheapest way to get forecast if you sail offshore through a service called "weather fax". Alternatives works through satellite with hefty monthly subscriptions. That service is the reason I bought yet another raspberry pi with a software defined radio module.
- ocdtrekkie 6y agoThis is, of course, silly but true, because fax has no endpoint authentication of any kind.
- emodendroket 6y agoIt kind of makes you feel ridiculous about the amount of work that we put into securing even systems that are in no way critical and then the world runs on unsecured mailboxes, homes which can be broken into by someone willing to kick hard enough, Social Security cards with no security features whatsoever, funds transfer that only requires your account and routing number to withdraw, and so on.
- ziml77 6y agoIt's not that ridiculous. Securing stuff on computers is more important due to the scale at which attacks can occur. On the internet, you can gather information on millions of users in little time and without putting yourself in a place where you could easily be caught. And for a machine that isn't connected to the internet, it can still give you far more data than you could get by stealing paper that takes up the same amount of physical space.
- emodendroket 6y ago
- straws 6y ago33 years, if you go by the patent. Lots more fun facts in Tim Hunkin's excellent Secret Life of Machines: https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/0301-The_FAX_Machine.html https://www.exploratorium.edu/ronh/SLOM/0301-The_FAX_Machine...
- jacobolus 6y agoTim Hunkin is recently making new videos! https://www.youtube.com/c/timhunkin1 https://www.youtube.com/c/timhunkin1