Old tools never completely die, as evidenced by an interesting piece by Martin Fackler in the New York Times, which meditates on the dogged place of the fax machine in otherwise high-tech Japanese culture. The opening:
“Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But it also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology — the fax machine — that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks and cassette tapes in the dustbin of outmoded technologies.
Last year alone, Japanese households bought 1.7 million of the old-style fax machines, which print documents on slick, glossy paper spooled in the back. In the United States, the device has become such an artifact that the Smithsonian is adding two machines to its collection, technology historians said.
‘The fax was such a success here that it has proven hard to replace,’ said Kenichi Shibata, a manager at NTT Communications, which led development of the technology in the 1970s. ‘It has grown unusually deep roots into Japanese society.'”