YUROP

This is why I sit memorized while my 3D printer does its work

Yeah, until you need to send a 200 page fax

Oh yes. It seemed like science fiction at the time, and when my office upgraded to a fax machine which printed on plain paper rather than the heat-sensitive stuff on a roll, that was actually pretty exciting. We still had Telex at the time, and it was only a few years since the inland telegram service had ended (you could still send them internationally).

In my younger days, I may, or may not, have sent sketches of massive, throbbing, cum-dripping dongs to multiple work locations.

I only really worked in an office for a very short period of time that had fax machines but I remember the big problem with them was that you knew you had received something but no one could find the piece of paper. Or the reverse, you'd sent someone something and now you couldn't find the document you sent, so then they had to send you the scan that you sent them. Which meant you had to phone them to get them to do it.

As boring as email is, if something has been sent or received you can always just pull it up again.

I'm pretty sure at one point we even printed out emails so the admin person, who was old and refused to adapt, could keep using the old filing system.

I don't get people defending fax machines for the input method.

All of that can still be built with modern technology. There is something like "Fax-to-email", I'm sure the other way around is possible as well. Put PGP and TLS on there and boom! almost modern. No Dialup or Analog-almost-digital datastream required.

The input method can still be the same. Have a device that simply scans a page, no compression, and then sends it away. It doesn't have to be sound modulated over a wire. It can be an email or messenger. You can even make an identification per phone number.

And then the lung cancer and disgusting smell. Maybe skip on the drugs while working