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Comment by itazula | Hacker News Reader

Fax machines -- They are single-function machines, and they are easy to use. No viruses or malware. Reminds me of the calculator I sometimes use ...

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Fax machines were invented before the telephone. Before the telegraph! They were originally a needle on a wax engraving for the send side; a pen on paper on the receive side. They scanned the wax cylinder, and a dot-skip-dot pattern on the receive side rendered the message. And all this was done in China.

Why? Because the character set in Eastern languages was far too large to fit into something like Morse Code. There was no real alternative.

I wonder if fax persists today for some similar reason?

Interesting hypothesis. I found little reference to fax being used in China early, only this http://mentalfloss.com/article/33586/idea-fax-machine-has-be....

I ran a hotel reservation network here in China about 7 years ago. We signed over 3000 contracts nearly exclusively by fax (I think one or two were email). All of our rates updates from partner hotels were faxed in. I built an Asterix/Hylafax based solution with a custom workqueue that worked brilliantly and XMPP IM'd employees to let them know how their fax send was progressing.

Yeah according to the Internet, Morse invented wired communications. Its hard to find any history that doesn't begin with him.

Here's all I found today: http://www.recordnations.com/articles/pantelegraph/

Something based on Morse code is indeed possible, and it was used:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code

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