Ah, the well-intentioned. Given the threatened consequences (severe business continuity incident), it genuinely would have made sense to call an emergency board meeting.

Better safe than sorry. I always appreciate it when colleagues come up to me when they doubt the authenticity of certain messages, no matter how obvious.

And this is a senior exec in the 90's, likely aging him 60-80 years old now. From experience this is not that wild of a response for people that age.

>And this is a senior exec in the 90's, likely aging him 60-80 years old now. From experience this is not that wild of a response for people that age.

Add at least a decade on. The mid-90s was 30 years ago now and senior execs then would most likely have been (at least) in their 40s or 50s...

I recall working as a temp agency contractor ten or twelve years ago alongside a fair pile of others, all from different agencies. Weekly timesheets had to be submitted.

The more up to date agencies accepted the timesheets via email. One lady who had just started was from yet another agency. The only way they would accept timesheets was via postal service or fax!

Cue a Friday afternoon helping a dumbfounded IT intern dig out a multi-function printer/fax unit from where it had been slumbering in the cupboard and connecting it up on a spare workbench, and off the timesheet went.

We cleared off home and came back in on Monday morning to find five sheets of what was clearly spam in the output tray!

Quite the introduction to things for the IT intern as well who stuck around to watch us send the fax off, having never seen one used before.

I'd have thought that a strongly worded message to the agency was called for - either they get their act together or they will be banned from providing services and a more capable agency will be asked to take over her contract.

> The Reply-All email came from a lowly consultant, who was let go for his criticism of the exec who sent the mail.

Looks like the Exec couldn't handle the Fax

In the days of yore I set up an email to fax link so that my elderly mother could read emails sent by her grandchildren. She had her own unique email address for this. This worked well to start with, then mum gave out the email address to some local shops so they could email her when an order was ready or sent some product details. In no time at all spam from third parties started to arrive, wasting fax roll. It was possible to put a filter in eventually.

In Germany, there was a time when you would get a fax “This is a holdup! Fax us all your money!” and then everyone would pull their banknotes out of their wallets and fax it. Usually the fax was from some company you were working with! “Dies ist ein Überfax! Faxen Sie uns all Ihr Geld” - words very similar to what an armed bankrobber would say.

They are still in heavy use by judges and at law offices. City and County governments still use them, too. So do CPAs, notarys and the like.

Note that I'm speaking of Silicon Valley and environs, where you'd think they'd know better ...

I once asked my solicitor why the legal profession still insisted on sending documents by fax.

"Because they can't be forged", I was told.

I proceeded to show them how easy it was for me to send them a fax that appeared to have come from their own machine.

"Oh, that was very easy".

" Because they can't be forged "

I imagine you could print a digital signature of the text on the page to be faxed (as a qcode?)

I cannot imagine digital faxes being any more secure than signed encrypted email.

The real reason is that fax machines send a receipt on delivery but I suspect they've forgotten all about that and have the machines set to ignore receipts and keep using them "because".

Yeah, we know.

Coopersmith, Jonathan

Faxed: The Rise and Fall of the Fax Machine (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

ISBN 9781421421230

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Back in the early '70's I'd often ring my wife (at that time my girlfriend), for a lunchtime chat. She was in a smallish office (readers into model making might remember MAP) and the person entrusted with picking up the phone wasn't too bright.

All this was at the time if a lot of the Irish troubles.

So I rang.

"Model and Allied Publications. Can I help you?"

In an Irish accent: "Discus da IRA.Youve heard of letter bombs? Well dis is da explodin' phone call"

I had to redial

In an Irish accent: "Discus da IRA.Youve heard of letter bombs?Well dis is da explodin' phone call"

If you had said Mossad, I might well have embarrassed my underwear.

Fax? It'll never replace Telex!

FAX? IT'LL NEVER REPLACE TELEX!

FTFY

There's a relic of fax machines to be found if the TIFF file format in the form of CCITT modified Huffman run-length encoding. I recall implementing that in my own TIFF-IO module for our image processing systems, way back when (1993, as I recall).

I also recall stories of fax machines being set up to send reports to the head office after midnight. Sometimes the phone number hadn't been entered correctly so some poor sod got woken up in the middle of the night, pick up the phone, and being treated to the scream of a fax machine trying to update sales figures.

"Sometimes the phone number hadn't been entered correctly"

I remember being on the sending end of that. We used fax S/W and the number was correct. The receiving office had two fax machines and for some reason redirected their calls on one to the other overnight. It was they who fumbled their own number.

Our progress-chaser received a phone-call from her husband; he had forgotten the shopping list. Could she remind him what was required?

She faxed him the list, including a £10 note "To pay for it".

A while later, he responded with a fax/picture of coins; "Your change." Enough to buy a beer ---->

She faxed him the list, including a £10 note "To pay for it".

Hardly any sillier than bitcoin, is it?

Unless she faxed both sides of the tenner which could be difficult † on one page, it would only be five quid.

Curious whether an otherwise valid promissary note (cheque?) faxed would have been acceptable in those times.

Faxes were very much a thing when I started in IT but the blighters never liked me and I rarely had much joy trying to send a fax. You learnt quickly to be very nice to the sexytaries (usually not onerous :) as the fax machines were obedient servants in their charming hands. Both the faxes and the ladies are long gone but only the latter is regretted.

† clever el Reg readers would of course photocopy each side and fax the two photocopies together.

I do love a good reply-all e-mail storm:

"Please remove me from this list"

"Please everyone stop replying to all"

As one of those who replied with the second option, the real thing to avoid is having read receipts requested. As it was a large company, 40,000 receipts later...

I saw the asterisk and assumed it would lead to a caveat: "except in the NHS", where they were common place until relatively recently!

OK, when you've all finished laughing at fax machines - think of all those big businesses who've been taken down with malware breaches recently. What wouldn't they have given to be able to revert to fax for some of their communications.