
Retrotechtacular: FAX as a Service in 1984 - mmastrac
http://hackaday.com/2016/11/04/retrotechtacular-fax-as-a-service-in-1984/
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Animats
Western Union tried something similar in 1952, called "Telecar". They had fax
machines in small trucks, which would drive around and deliver telegrams.

This was an extension of Western Union's DeskFax service. Western Union
offered this from the 1940s to the 1960s. They had a little desktop machine
which could both scan and print on small pieces of paper. But it transmitted
only to a Western Union office, where the message was _manually retyped_ and
sent through Western Union's Teletype-based message switching system.[2] At
the receiving end, the Teletype output might be scanned and delivered to the
end user's DeskFax.

Some people still have and restore these machines. The end-user machines won't
talk peer to peer without a conversion unit in the middle, but it's not that
hard to build one.

(How Western Union blew it as a business is an sad story. They were a
nationwide digital communications company long before anybody else. But their
management was very attached to their structure of vast numbers of retail
offices and message delivery at a high price point.

Today's Western Union is just a name, bought by First Data for their money
transfer service.)

[1]
[http://blog.modernmechanix.com/telecar/](http://blog.modernmechanix.com/telecar/)
[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAJQVStZYDk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAJQVStZYDk)

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nerdponx
Is FAX an acronym? I thought it was just short for "facsimile"

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delinka
It is not an acronym. It is indeed an abbreviation for 'facsimile.' FAX is a
common mis-rendering.

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leereeves
> Zap mailed started out meeting some of these, but rapidly became expensive,
> slower (had to wait for a delivery), less convenient (only sends to FedEx
> offices), and didn’t maintain a significant lead on quality.

> You could easily draw a parallel to, say, 3D printing as a service.

Or you could draw a parallel between 3D printing and 2D printing as a service,
which sustained a number of businesses like Kinko's.

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unreal37
I just had dinner with someone two days ago who had this idea. "Who owns a fax
machine any more? Sometimes you have to fax a document, so someone should
create a service where you send your document to them and they fax it for
you."

I reminded him that the local convenience store had printing, photocopying and
faxing service at 10 cents a page for such a need.

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icebraining
There are also more email-to-fax services (and fax-to-email, as well) than one
can shake a stick at.

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pbhjpbhj
Or online (or email) services: myfax, efax, ...

See [http://www.faxcompare.com/](http://www.faxcompare.com/) for a few more.

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GirlsCanCode
I 3D print a lot and I don't own a printer. I don't think the comparison is
sound.

