9 ms·

Japan’s love affair with the fax machine (2021)

62 points by ecliptik 3y ago

anigbrowl 3y ago
Can't blame them, given how mediocre computer representation continues to be. Just hop onto any Wikipedia page about Chinese characters, and be perplexed at the non-displayability of many characters, eg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chinese_radical/%E4%B9%99 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chinese_radical/%E4%... Unicode just isn't a good solution for pictographic languages where new characters can be invented the same way new words can be coined in alphabetic languages. In practice this doesn't happen that often, but there's no reason they can't be; there's an annual creative kanji contest in Japan: https://sousaku-kanji.com/archive.html https://sousaku-kanji.com/archive.html
- jacquesm 3y ago
  That's super interesting: so even the 'well meaning' Unicode committee got a basic part of writing culturally very wrong: the assumption was that these are Alphabets, rather than living things. Alphabets change as well over time, but much more slowly than the words. Thanks for pointing this out.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I think emojis were a mistake to include in Unicode. But they actually prove that we could continue adding characters, if the design allowed enough foresight in space designated to these evolving sets.
    - Macha 3y ago
      To an extent, the fact that they made so much software care about non-BMP characters that otherwise wouldn't and the fact that they made English speaking users care about characters outside Latin-1 makes it worthwhile. Even from an English speaking country, running into software that wouldn't accept the € sign was a problem until the early 10s, and I think displaying emojis drives American companies more than displaying the euro sign or kanji. So I'll give emojis in Unicode a wide pass on criticism for their effect in making everyone actually support all of unicode, and making people give up things like MySQL's utf8mb3.
- wk_end 3y ago
  AFAIK the construction of new kanji is a novelty, not something of any real importance in communication. Japan has embraced UTF-8, and before that they embraced Shift-JIS - a homegrown encoding that also didn't support constructing new characters. Is there any encoding that works well for this particular case? AFAIK there aren't any of any prominence, which suggests that it's a non-issue - surely if constructing new characters was important to them, Japanese or Chinese or Taiwanese computer scientists and standards organizations would push for some kind of encoding that enabled it.
  - hfhdjdks 3y ago
    You're correct. Parent comment says something true (some / many characters don't have a representation in most fonts), but the inference it makes is wrong (this is a bottleneck for communication)
    - Macha 3y ago
      And specifically these characters that are not present in mainstream fonts are getting so far down the long tail that most natives wouldn't know how to write them, so would result in e.g. hiragana in Japanese if they knew the word at all. To some extent computers have even increased the variety of kanji usage as you'll get textbooks that describe a word as "usually written in kana" because it's infrequent enough that an average Japanese person wouldn't be confident to handwrite it from scratch, and so twenty years ago that meant they had to use Hiragana. But in these days of computer IMEs when they type it in phonetically and get a list of options presented to them, they're confident enough to pick one, and so the kanji gets used a lot more.
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        so far down the long tail that most natives wouldn't know how to write them True, but if we can't even display them then chunks of language are going to effectively disappear because people will have less and less opportunity to encounter them.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
- hfhdjdks 3y ago
  Does this come from actual experience trying to communicate in chinese or japanese? At least for chinese (but I'm pretty sure it applies to japanese too), what you're saying doesn't ring as relevant (i.e. it is true that some characters don't have a graphic representation in many fonts, but it doesn't cause problems for communication / creation of new words) Plenty of fonts can represent a vast amount of characters (search around, but even free fonts can have >50k), much more than even highly literate people could ever use (a very educated person might know 8k characters, but would use much less actively). Every new release of Unicode releases new characters that are slowly incorporated into fonts...but for many years these are on the truly long tail of characters, nothing that any common person would use. There might be a few exceptions with new characters (the new japanese emperor characters comes to mind), but the thing to bear in mind is that new words don't necessarily involve new characters. A big chunk of nouns in chinese are composed of multiple characters, so making a new combination can generate a new word (电视 is television...electric + vision). This is probably even easier in japanese were they can use katakana to spell an English word and create a new japanese word.
  - earthboundkid 3y ago
    Yes. Han Unification is something people read about online and decide is bad or whatever, but it actually isn’t relevant to using Japanese with computers. People use Shift-JIS and fax machines because legacy technology takes a long time to die everywhere and longer in Japan. It’s not more complicated than that.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      This is correct: as much as it's wrong, Han Unification isn't a problem so long you stick to one language to support and remove all conflicting fonts for the other two locales, which are rarely needed anyway in Asia, it just comes back when you try to support multiple CJK languages at the same time. Unicode coverage of each languages are totally fine for 99% of use cases, the Unification problem is just it's reusing the same address space for all CJK languages.
      - 3y ago
- mostlylurks 3y ago
  > In practice this doesn't happen that often The primary reason that this doesn't happen that often is that neither Chinese nor Japanese use Chinese characters in a primarily pictographic manner anymore. Only a small subset of the characters are pictographic (and even they are only vaguely so), and unlike in the distant past, most words are actually compositions of several characters, so new words can be represented via either combinations of existing characters if applicable, or via borrowing existing characters for their pronunciation (or in the case of Japanese, using the syllabic characters).
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    most words are actually compositions of several characters For that matter most characters are combinations of other ones. Briefly, there are 27 different stroke shapes and 214 different 'radicals' in kanji that are recombined in various ways to form new characters. Japanese kanji overlap heavily with Chinese Kangxi, but they're gone in somewhat different directions over the last few centuries. (I'm interested in both languages but less familiar with Chinese than Japanese because I can't speak the former at all.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stroke_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stro... I'm not a linguist, but I don't think you can understand languages that use Chinese characters if you're not willing to look at the components those characters are built out of. I mean, you could just learn them by sight and remember the ~2000 most common ones, but that seems like both a more shallow and difficult approach. Anyway, a lot of the more obscure characters are not displayed properly on most web pages like the Wikipedia example above because they're in one of the CJK extension tables, and this seems like a problem, because few people are going to want to dig through the unicode charts to find them. This isn't a problem with unicode as such, but with the way browsers and operating systems implement it. https://unicode.org/charts/ https://unicode.org/charts/
    - Macha 3y ago
      You couldn't simply do an encoding that generates kanji procedurally from the list of component radicals because of the differing placements, and sometimes significant modifications of the radicals to fit in the kanji. Take the kanji 勉 which is made up of the radicals 免 and 力. You could maybe have a "right half" slot for the 力 radical which would figure out the stretching but the fact that the leg of 免 extends underneath it is something that only exists for that kanji and then you'll need to special case it.
- elFarto 3y ago
  Actually Unicode has something for character creation: 'IDS', or Ideographic Description Sequence. For example, the Chinese character for the word Biang[1] can be describe with: ⿺辶⿳穴⿲月⿱⿲幺言幺⿲長馬長刂心 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_character_for_bi.C3.A1ng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha...
kwanbix 3y ago
Well, here in Germany they still use them. Not the most used communication's device, but still used.
- suction 3y ago
  [dead]
fxtentacle 3y ago
It's also very popular in Germany, for three simple reasons: 1. It is a written form, so you can sign things with a pen before faxing it. It functions like a scanned PDF. 2. You don't get spam like with email because the sender has to pay to reach you. 3. You get a confirmation that your document was received. And unlike email read receipts, those confirmations are honest because spam is not an issue.
- mbg721 3y ago
  In the US there always was occasional fax spam. I think I saw one maybe 5 years ago.
  - unwind 3y ago
    The US is known for having free local landline calls, something that as far as I know is not very common globally.
  - dylan604 3y ago
    Remember the sheet fed by roller fax machines? Urban legend says that if you fed a piece of black construction paper into the sending machine and then tape the ends together after it had pulled through enough to do so would cause the receiving end to run out of toner and/or paper. Prank fax calls instead of SPAM.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  Fax spam used to be a problem many years back (and some famous "DoS" attacks of faxing someone a completely black piece of paper on a loop to use up all their ink). Is that no longer the case? My guess in the US it's no longer a problem just because so few people use faxes anymore, but don't know about the rest of the world.
- vel0city 3y ago
  Fax spam can be a thing. An old fax number at my office would get 1-2 spam faxes a week for a while. Often related to some kind of vacation membership scam.
- deleted 3y ago
donohoe 3y ago
Oh, am reminder of this 2020 story about the last pager user in Japan https://restofworld.org/2020/japan-last-pager/ https://restofworld.org/2020/japan-last-pager/
icedchai 3y ago
Certain industries in the US, such as construction, are still very dependent on fax machines.
- werdnapk 3y ago
  A lot of prescriptions are still sent to pharmacies by fax.
hadlock 3y ago
Fax is plenty popular with small businesses in the US. A lot of it is efax but still plenty of fax in the US
insane_dreamer 3y ago
I just received a letter from the IRS asking for a document, which they said could be sent by post or by ... fax
supernova87a 3y ago
By the way, the article isn't so much about the fax machine as about the Japanese belief that they were technologically leading the world (read it). I don't have a strong opinion about whether they were / continue to lead in tech, but I do have a strong belief that Japan and its general culture does lend itself to a much stronger valuing of conscientiousness in work and doing things well / fully / to the best. Maybe that's a bit of cultural myth of course, which the Japanese benefit from propagating. (All the movies, mentions of people who take decades to perfect their craft; even small everyday jobs being done well; things on time; everyone polite, considerate, etc) But there definitely is something about what attentiveness to detail can achieve, when allowed to happen by emphasis of culture or the work at hand. I don't know if I or anyone I work with every gets to be conscientious about doing something really well and to high competence. It seems that everything I'm involved in is "let's try it and see whether it works" and then give up and move onto the next thing. Or "well, good enough". Which is good for some purposes and ends, but not good for developing a decades-long expertise, deep expertise and wisdom, about doing things.
- PakG1 3y ago
  This is an interesting comment. I once took an exchange course at Oxford regarding the history of business. One of the professor's lectures was on innovative edge and the issues it brings. He brought up various examples in history, but his most notable one was from Japan. Japanese swords were hardcore the best of the best. When foreigners first came to Japan, Japan laughed at their weaponry. Japan believed it had the pinnacle of weaponry and they were right for the most part, especially when it came to sword combat. But even the projectile weaponry that the foreigners brought also sucked in terms of operational reality. The Japanese sat confidently atop their mountain of sophistication. Then many many years later, foreigners came again, this time with more effective ships, cannons, guns, etc. The Japanese sword meant nothing in that context because the new weapons changed the rules of battle. It's interesting that Japan may keep experiencing this as a cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, there is beauty in seeking perfection in something, achieving it, and being satisfied with it. On the other hand, there is the risk of getting blindsided by a third party's innovation. Interestingly enough, after many years of 20-20 hindsight, the achievement of and satisfaction with perfection may be a more sustainable attitude than constantly trying to innovate. It's probably better for society and better for the environment. But humanity doesn't move forward if not for the innovation that breaks the rules. You probably want both in the world and constant tension between the two in order for the world because on their own, they probably both have issues.
lsllc 3y ago
Fax is widely used in small to medium medical offices still in the US. Lab reports, radiology, referrals, prescriptions (for things like PT). End up in the ER on vacation? Unless your primary doc is in the same "health system" it's quite likely that the paperwork will be faxed from the ER to your doc.
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  This says much less about fax than about the dysfunctional "healthcare system" in the US.
  - johnwalkr 3y ago
    That's not it. Other countries with universal healthcare also use faxes. It's a conservative industry and you have less legal risk to send a fax and get another signed fax back than to rely on email, docusign, documentsignr.com or whatever. They won't be replaced until it's both very clear and also required to move to some standard digital signature system. This is resisted by the public everywhere because this pretty much means requiring an e-id system.
- ksec 3y ago
  That is similar to many other countries as well. 99% of HN has a world view of Tech where the definition "tech" means Software Industry.
ecef9-8c0f-4374 3y ago
A decentralized p2p communication sytem. It even can voice chat ;-)
ajb 3y ago
Faxes, like modems, require an absolute timesync between the ends of the link. Packet networks are not designed to provide this, and a horrible hack (ITU T.38) is implemented in VoIP systems to fake it.Having had to debug an implementation of T.38 once, I expect that after a while no-one will bother to maintain it and these devices will stop working.Or they will just work only over email or some other mailbox system.
wdb 3y ago
Still remember when over night Ingram Micro would fax you the latest price list changes or deals. Pages and pages over night would be incoming.
johnwalkr 3y ago
For what it's worth, I worked in Canada from 2005 to 2012 as a mechanical engineer and had to use faxes at least once a month for ordering from some old school suppliers in Canada and USA (for things like steel bars and rods). This was at multiple companies. I lived in Japan from 2012-2022, and had to send a fax precisely once, for my first apartment contract. I did it from a 7-11. I know medical and legal places still use them, but that's true in North America too. I did a quick check of some suppliers of mechanical parts in USA (McMaster-Carr) Canada (Grainger) and Japan (Misumi) since that is my background and they all still accept orders by fax. But, a difference is outside of conservative industries[1], you still see fax machines a lot more in Japan because it's more recent than in North America that they were ubiquitous. You will occasionally see a dusty one in a home or office, and many mom-and-pop restaurants have an unused one in a corner because the online reservation services used to send faxes to restaurants. I think you had the option of receiving a fax or email back in day, but now you get (and probably require) a dedicated tablet or interface to your POS. I didn't see a received fax in a tray anywhere since about 2015. Another difference is internal processes in companies and government in Japan have historically required stamps for each approving person, and it was natural to extend the processes to fax, at least as a temporary measure until the physical document made its rounds. It's also worth noting that pretty much every company in Japan switched to docusign or similar during covid, and government agencies are also required to switch soon. Overall I think faxes persist a bit longer in Japan, but at this point only in the same industries that use them in other countries too. It's a thing that exists but I would hardly call it a "love affair". As a normal person going about your life there's more reminders that fax machines exist, but the actual usage is low and rapidly decreasing. [1] There's a reason conservative industries still use faxes. Physical documents and signatures are the benchmarks for legal documents and faxes are still physical documents with signatures that can be produced from a filing cabinet, and whatever your legal predicament is you can be sure there is case law to blame the other party based on documents and signatures. And there's no universal/international, non-proprietary, widely-adopted standard to replace documents and signatures. If you're a doctor sending a prescription from one hospital to another (and both hospitals have strict requirements for record keeping), sending a fax still makes sense.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
easyThrowaway 3y ago
I've heard some genuine horror stories regarding fax machines being used in software development in japan. A prime example was in the early 2000, circa 2003-04, when it was somewhat common for Japanese studios to outsource Game Boy Advance ports from arcade machines to smaller studios residing in Eastern and Southern Europe. A friend of mine was working in a studio tasked with porting several Irem (or Konami, can't remember) shooters. Despite communicating by normal means with the EU publisher and distributor, the contractual side was handled by fax, which they had specifically bought for this reason. Once the contract had been signed... nothing happened. That is, for all practical purposes they were expected to rebuild the game from scratch. They had zero support of communication from the original publisher and developer, Once they pointed out to the firm that it was an absolutely insane idea, and if at least they could ftpd them a snapshot of the original sources/assets, again all they got was radio silence. Then, after a week or two they started receiving... something, by fax. And by "something" I mean "printed and rescanned at 72DPI Black and White pages of partial Motorola 68K source code and artwork on grid paper fully in japanese". It was an obscene amount of useless, nearly unreadable data. Eventually they decided to ignore the original dev and got paid support from some MAME guys that basically helped them rev-eng the original roms. No idea how they were expected to send the finished game, I can only hope they didn't have to fax it back.

62 points by ecliptik 3y ago

Can't blame them, given how mediocre computer representation continues to be. Just hop onto any Wikipedia page about Chinese characters, and be perplexed at the non-displayability of many characters, eg https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chinese_radical/%E4%B9%99 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Chinese_radical/%E4%... Unicode just isn't a good solution for pictographic languages where new characters can be invented the same way new words can be coined in alphabetic languages. In practice this doesn't happen that often, but there's no reason they can't be; there's an annual creative kanji contest in Japan: https://sousaku-kanji.com/archive.html https://sousaku-kanji.com/archive.html

jacquesm 3y ago
That's super interesting: so even the 'well meaning' Unicode committee got a basic part of writing culturally very wrong: the assumption was that these are Alphabets, rather than living things. Alphabets change as well over time, but much more slowly than the words. Thanks for pointing this out.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I think emojis were a mistake to include in Unicode. But they actually prove that we could continue adding characters, if the design allowed enough foresight in space designated to these evolving sets.
  - Macha 3y ago
    To an extent, the fact that they made so much software care about non-BMP characters that otherwise wouldn't and the fact that they made English speaking users care about characters outside Latin-1 makes it worthwhile. Even from an English speaking country, running into software that wouldn't accept the € sign was a problem until the early 10s, and I think displaying emojis drives American companies more than displaying the euro sign or kanji. So I'll give emojis in Unicode a wide pass on criticism for their effect in making everyone actually support all of unicode, and making people give up things like MySQL's utf8mb3.
wk_end 3y ago
AFAIK the construction of new kanji is a novelty, not something of any real importance in communication. Japan has embraced UTF-8, and before that they embraced Shift-JIS - a homegrown encoding that also didn't support constructing new characters. Is there any encoding that works well for this particular case? AFAIK there aren't any of any prominence, which suggests that it's a non-issue - surely if constructing new characters was important to them, Japanese or Chinese or Taiwanese computer scientists and standards organizations would push for some kind of encoding that enabled it.
- hfhdjdks 3y ago
  You're correct. Parent comment says something true (some / many characters don't have a representation in most fonts), but the inference it makes is wrong (this is a bottleneck for communication)
  - Macha 3y ago
    And specifically these characters that are not present in mainstream fonts are getting so far down the long tail that most natives wouldn't know how to write them, so would result in e.g. hiragana in Japanese if they knew the word at all. To some extent computers have even increased the variety of kanji usage as you'll get textbooks that describe a word as "usually written in kana" because it's infrequent enough that an average Japanese person wouldn't be confident to handwrite it from scratch, and so twenty years ago that meant they had to use Hiragana. But in these days of computer IMEs when they type it in phonetically and get a list of options presented to them, they're confident enough to pick one, and so the kanji gets used a lot more.
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      so far down the long tail that most natives wouldn't know how to write them True, but if we can't even display them then chunks of language are going to effectively disappear because people will have less and less opportunity to encounter them.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
hfhdjdks 3y ago
Does this come from actual experience trying to communicate in chinese or japanese? At least for chinese (but I'm pretty sure it applies to japanese too), what you're saying doesn't ring as relevant (i.e. it is true that some characters don't have a graphic representation in many fonts, but it doesn't cause problems for communication / creation of new words) Plenty of fonts can represent a vast amount of characters (search around, but even free fonts can have >50k), much more than even highly literate people could ever use (a very educated person might know 8k characters, but would use much less actively). Every new release of Unicode releases new characters that are slowly incorporated into fonts...but for many years these are on the truly long tail of characters, nothing that any common person would use. There might be a few exceptions with new characters (the new japanese emperor characters comes to mind), but the thing to bear in mind is that new words don't necessarily involve new characters. A big chunk of nouns in chinese are composed of multiple characters, so making a new combination can generate a new word (电视 is television...electric + vision). This is probably even easier in japanese were they can use katakana to spell an English word and create a new japanese word.
- earthboundkid 3y ago
  Yes. Han Unification is something people read about online and decide is bad or whatever, but it actually isn’t relevant to using Japanese with computers. People use Shift-JIS and fax machines because legacy technology takes a long time to die everywhere and longer in Japan. It’s not more complicated than that.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    This is correct: as much as it's wrong, Han Unification isn't a problem so long you stick to one language to support and remove all conflicting fonts for the other two locales, which are rarely needed anyway in Asia, it just comes back when you try to support multiple CJK languages at the same time. Unicode coverage of each languages are totally fine for 99% of use cases, the Unification problem is just it's reusing the same address space for all CJK languages.
    - 3y ago
mostlylurks 3y ago
> In practice this doesn't happen that often The primary reason that this doesn't happen that often is that neither Chinese nor Japanese use Chinese characters in a primarily pictographic manner anymore. Only a small subset of the characters are pictographic (and even they are only vaguely so), and unlike in the distant past, most words are actually compositions of several characters, so new words can be represented via either combinations of existing characters if applicable, or via borrowing existing characters for their pronunciation (or in the case of Japanese, using the syllabic characters).
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  most words are actually compositions of several characters For that matter most characters are combinations of other ones. Briefly, there are 27 different stroke shapes and 214 different 'radicals' in kanji that are recombined in various ways to form new characters. Japanese kanji overlap heavily with Chinese Kangxi, but they're gone in somewhat different directions over the last few centuries. (I'm interested in both languages but less familiar with Chinese than Japanese because I can't speak the former at all.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stroke_count https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kanji_radicals_by_stro... I'm not a linguist, but I don't think you can understand languages that use Chinese characters if you're not willing to look at the components those characters are built out of. I mean, you could just learn them by sight and remember the ~2000 most common ones, but that seems like both a more shallow and difficult approach. Anyway, a lot of the more obscure characters are not displayed properly on most web pages like the Wikipedia example above because they're in one of the CJK extension tables, and this seems like a problem, because few people are going to want to dig through the unicode charts to find them. This isn't a problem with unicode as such, but with the way browsers and operating systems implement it. https://unicode.org/charts/ https://unicode.org/charts/
  - Macha 3y ago
    You couldn't simply do an encoding that generates kanji procedurally from the list of component radicals because of the differing placements, and sometimes significant modifications of the radicals to fit in the kanji. Take the kanji 勉 which is made up of the radicals 免 and 力. You could maybe have a "right half" slot for the 力 radical which would figure out the stretching but the fact that the leg of 免 extends underneath it is something that only exists for that kanji and then you'll need to special case it.
elFarto 3y ago
Actually Unicode has something for character creation: 'IDS', or Ideographic Description Sequence. For example, the Chinese character for the word Biang[1] can be describe with: ⿺辶⿳穴⿲月⿱⿲幺言幺⿲長馬長刂心 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_character_for_bi.C3.A1ng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles#Chinese_cha...

kwanbix 3y ago

Well, here in Germany they still use them. Not the most used communication's device, but still used.

suction 3y ago
[dead]

fxtentacle 3y ago

It's also very popular in Germany, for three simple reasons: 1. It is a written form, so you can sign things with a pen before faxing it. It functions like a scanned PDF. 2. You don't get spam like with email because the sender has to pay to reach you. 3. You get a confirmation that your document was received. And unlike email read receipts, those confirmations are honest because spam is not an issue.

mbg721 3y ago
In the US there always was occasional fax spam. I think I saw one maybe 5 years ago.
- unwind 3y ago
  The US is known for having free local landline calls, something that as far as I know is not very common globally.
- dylan604 3y ago
  Remember the sheet fed by roller fax machines? Urban legend says that if you fed a piece of black construction paper into the sending machine and then tape the ends together after it had pulled through enough to do so would cause the receiving end to run out of toner and/or paper. Prank fax calls instead of SPAM.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Fax spam used to be a problem many years back (and some famous "DoS" attacks of faxing someone a completely black piece of paper on a loop to use up all their ink). Is that no longer the case? My guess in the US it's no longer a problem just because so few people use faxes anymore, but don't know about the rest of the world.
vel0city 3y ago
Fax spam can be a thing. An old fax number at my office would get 1-2 spam faxes a week for a while. Often related to some kind of vacation membership scam.
deleted 3y ago

donohoe 3y ago

Oh, am reminder of this 2020 story about the last pager user in Japan https://restofworld.org/2020/japan-last-pager/ https://restofworld.org/2020/japan-last-pager/

icedchai 3y ago

Certain industries in the US, such as construction, are still very dependent on fax machines.

werdnapk 3y ago
A lot of prescriptions are still sent to pharmacies by fax.

hadlock 3y ago

Fax is plenty popular with small businesses in the US. A lot of it is efax but still plenty of fax in the US

insane_dreamer 3y ago

I just received a letter from the IRS asking for a document, which they said could be sent by post or by ... fax

supernova87a 3y ago

By the way, the article isn't so much about the fax machine as about the Japanese belief that they were technologically leading the world (read it). I don't have a strong opinion about whether they were / continue to lead in tech, but I do have a strong belief that Japan and its general culture does lend itself to a much stronger valuing of conscientiousness in work and doing things well / fully / to the best. Maybe that's a bit of cultural myth of course, which the Japanese benefit from propagating. (All the movies, mentions of people who take decades to perfect their craft; even small everyday jobs being done well; things on time; everyone polite, considerate, etc) But there definitely is something about what attentiveness to detail can achieve, when allowed to happen by emphasis of culture or the work at hand. I don't know if I or anyone I work with every gets to be conscientious about doing something really well and to high competence. It seems that everything I'm involved in is "let's try it and see whether it works" and then give up and move onto the next thing. Or "well, good enough". Which is good for some purposes and ends, but not good for developing a decades-long expertise, deep expertise and wisdom, about doing things.

PakG1 3y ago
This is an interesting comment. I once took an exchange course at Oxford regarding the history of business. One of the professor's lectures was on innovative edge and the issues it brings. He brought up various examples in history, but his most notable one was from Japan. Japanese swords were hardcore the best of the best. When foreigners first came to Japan, Japan laughed at their weaponry. Japan believed it had the pinnacle of weaponry and they were right for the most part, especially when it came to sword combat. But even the projectile weaponry that the foreigners brought also sucked in terms of operational reality. The Japanese sat confidently atop their mountain of sophistication. Then many many years later, foreigners came again, this time with more effective ships, cannons, guns, etc. The Japanese sword meant nothing in that context because the new weapons changed the rules of battle. It's interesting that Japan may keep experiencing this as a cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, there is beauty in seeking perfection in something, achieving it, and being satisfied with it. On the other hand, there is the risk of getting blindsided by a third party's innovation. Interestingly enough, after many years of 20-20 hindsight, the achievement of and satisfaction with perfection may be a more sustainable attitude than constantly trying to innovate. It's probably better for society and better for the environment. But humanity doesn't move forward if not for the innovation that breaks the rules. You probably want both in the world and constant tension between the two in order for the world because on their own, they probably both have issues.

lsllc 3y ago

Fax is widely used in small to medium medical offices still in the US. Lab reports, radiology, referrals, prescriptions (for things like PT). End up in the ER on vacation? Unless your primary doc is in the same "health system" it's quite likely that the paperwork will be faxed from the ER to your doc.

ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
This says much less about fax than about the dysfunctional "healthcare system" in the US.
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  That's not it. Other countries with universal healthcare also use faxes. It's a conservative industry and you have less legal risk to send a fax and get another signed fax back than to rely on email, docusign, documentsignr.com or whatever. They won't be replaced until it's both very clear and also required to move to some standard digital signature system. This is resisted by the public everywhere because this pretty much means requiring an e-id system.
ksec 3y ago
That is similar to many other countries as well. 99% of HN has a world view of Tech where the definition "tech" means Software Industry.

ecef9-8c0f-4374 3y ago

A decentralized p2p communication sytem. It even can voice chat ;-)

ajb 3y ago

Faxes, like modems, require an absolute timesync between the ends of the link. Packet networks are not designed to provide this, and a horrible hack (ITU T.38) is implemented in VoIP systems to fake it.Having had to debug an implementation of T.38 once, I expect that after a while no-one will bother to maintain it and these devices will stop working.Or they will just work only over email or some other mailbox system.

wdb 3y ago

Still remember when over night Ingram Micro would fax you the latest price list changes or deals. Pages and pages over night would be incoming.

johnwalkr 3y ago

For what it's worth, I worked in Canada from 2005 to 2012 as a mechanical engineer and had to use faxes at least once a month for ordering from some old school suppliers in Canada and USA (for things like steel bars and rods). This was at multiple companies. I lived in Japan from 2012-2022, and had to send a fax precisely once, for my first apartment contract. I did it from a 7-11. I know medical and legal places still use them, but that's true in North America too. I did a quick check of some suppliers of mechanical parts in USA (McMaster-Carr) Canada (Grainger) and Japan (Misumi) since that is my background and they all still accept orders by fax. But, a difference is outside of conservative industries[1], you still see fax machines a lot more in Japan because it's more recent than in North America that they were ubiquitous. You will occasionally see a dusty one in a home or office, and many mom-and-pop restaurants have an unused one in a corner because the online reservation services used to send faxes to restaurants. I think you had the option of receiving a fax or email back in day, but now you get (and probably require) a dedicated tablet or interface to your POS. I didn't see a received fax in a tray anywhere since about 2015. Another difference is internal processes in companies and government in Japan have historically required stamps for each approving person, and it was natural to extend the processes to fax, at least as a temporary measure until the physical document made its rounds. It's also worth noting that pretty much every company in Japan switched to docusign or similar during covid, and government agencies are also required to switch soon. Overall I think faxes persist a bit longer in Japan, but at this point only in the same industries that use them in other countries too. It's a thing that exists but I would hardly call it a "love affair". As a normal person going about your life there's more reminders that fax machines exist, but the actual usage is low and rapidly decreasing. [1] There's a reason conservative industries still use faxes. Physical documents and signatures are the benchmarks for legal documents and faxes are still physical documents with signatures that can be produced from a filing cabinet, and whatever your legal predicament is you can be sure there is case law to blame the other party based on documents and signatures. And there's no universal/international, non-proprietary, widely-adopted standard to replace documents and signatures. If you're a doctor sending a prescription from one hospital to another (and both hospitals have strict requirements for record keeping), sending a fax still makes sense.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

easyThrowaway 3y ago

I've heard some genuine horror stories regarding fax machines being used in software development in japan. A prime example was in the early 2000, circa 2003-04, when it was somewhat common for Japanese studios to outsource Game Boy Advance ports from arcade machines to smaller studios residing in Eastern and Southern Europe. A friend of mine was working in a studio tasked with porting several Irem (or Konami, can't remember) shooters. Despite communicating by normal means with the EU publisher and distributor, the contractual side was handled by fax, which they had specifically bought for this reason. Once the contract had been signed... nothing happened. That is, for all practical purposes they were expected to rebuild the game from scratch. They had zero support of communication from the original publisher and developer, Once they pointed out to the firm that it was an absolutely insane idea, and if at least they could ftpd them a snapshot of the original sources/assets, again all they got was radio silence. Then, after a week or two they started receiving... something, by fax. And by "something" I mean "printed and rescanned at 72DPI Black and White pages of partial Motorola 68K source code and artwork on grid paper fully in japanese". It was an obscene amount of useless, nearly unreadable data. Eventually they decided to ignore the original dev and got paid support from some MAME guys that basically helped them rev-eng the original roms. No idea how they were expected to send the finished game, I can only hope they didn't have to fax it back.