Retrotechtacular: FAX as a Service in 1984 | Hacker News Reader

Retrotechtacular: FAX as a Service in 1984

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41 pointsmmastrac9 comments

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/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAJQVStZYDk

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

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

Aside: This is the reason I keep half-joking/half-serious mentioning we should take back the name "fax" and recycle it as a better, easier/more-fun to say, vocabulary for 3D Printers. They build 3D facsimiles, thus they are fax machines and a 3D printed object (for which no good terms exist) is a fax. There's enough context shift not to be confusing with old school 2D fax machines. (Allowing of course, for silliness like GL(tf) over modem creating new "fax numbers" and some intentional confusion for amusements sake.)

> 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.

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.

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

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

See http://www.faxcompare.com/ for a few more.

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

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