Facsimile: Difference between revisions

{{g}}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<ref>Experience and wisdom.</ref>, and those who can’t<ref>Youth and beauty.</ref>.

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 rep|loo paper]] you used to get in nasty educational establishments.  

Granted, there was a [[substrate|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]].