Facsimile
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The successor in “almost-immediately obsolete contraptions” to the telex machine and, before that, the canal, nowadays the facsimile machine is mostly useful for affording bragging rights, both for those who can remember having to use them and what they were for[1], and those who can’t.[2]
The fax was desperate the last stand of the true analogue communication: a fax started out life as a piece of paper and ended up as one: a horrid, waxy, faded piece of parchment resemblent of the loo paper you used to get in nasty educational establishments.
Granted, there was a digital component to a fax transmission — the document was digitised and send across a PABX network as a series of ones and zeroes — only to be undigitised and rendered full useless at the other end, the usable digital information lost forever in a squeal and whirr of odd boinky noises and static. So close, but so far away.
A fax that ran out of paper was an important McGuffin in the denouement of John Grisham's espievie thriller, The Firm. Not to be out-done, Hunter Barkley’s forthcoming novel is going to involve a malfunctioning telex.