Remembering the Fax Machine: Was It the AI of Its Time?

Remember the Fax machine?  I do, but my reason for bringing it up is different than you might think.  Bear with me for a few minutes as I make the case that the Fax machine bears striking resemblance to AI in many ways (but not in how we discussed it.)  Buy the argument?  Great? Reject the argument?  No problem.  All any of us can do now is think and guess; none of us have a definitive view of what AI is or how it will shape the world to come. 

But we do know how the fax machine affected business and life. 

Let me start with a story.  My wife and I were at a Circuit City (remember it?) in 1991 and came across a Fax machine for sale.  We could not really afford it but bought it anyway.   Though we had one phone line at home, we were able to use the fax machine by knowing when we would receive faxes and switching the line to the fax at the appointed time. Sending faxes was easier as we did not have to coordinate with anyone else.

We used it quite a bit.  We had incipient business interests, so the machine came in handy as did, frankly, the panache of having one at home.  We even used it for personal correspondence when we moved abroad, since phone calls were prohibitively expensive.

We used the machine a great deal during the 1990s; By 1992, we had it on a dedicated line and though money was tight, the ROI was high- it was worth it.  When we both went into the corporate world, we realized how much business was conducted on that medium.  For the next ten years or so, we witnessed the fax machine being used for correspondence, sales, and marketing.  Fax machines were often “spammed,” meaning unsolicited inbound marketing messages came in on a regular basis.  Newsletter services abounded; I remember one that gave us a synopsis of the day’s business news from sources like the WSJ and IBD.  It was extremely useful. 

During the dotcom era, Purchase Orders came in by fax.  At the end of the quarter, we often turned off fax machines so that we could “move” the order to the next quarter since we had already beat our numbers handily. 

Since the machine was a crucial element of marketing and sales (of business really) it occupied an important place in our work lives. It was a channel for marketing and sales, like any other.

It was part of the warp and weft of business, a ubiquitous thing that need not have been mentioned all the time.  When something has infused everything, we no longer need to give it a name.  We do not refer to human beings as “air-enabled” or “water-enabled.”  We just are.  Put simply, businesses were Fax-enabled but they never called themselves that.

Do you see where I am going with this?

Somewhere along the way, there was a rhetorical shift.  Typewriters were key to business at one point, but I have never seen an old press release that called a company “Typewriter -enabled” or an artifact that was labeled “Typewriter -generated.”  But now, all we hear about is X being “AI-enabled, “AI-generated” or the like.  Is that a sign that AI is yet not “built-in” or fundamental to organizations?  Or is it a sign that PR-language is the only one we can wield? 

Many technologies have changed the course of business and of life.  So far, AI has not done either.  Surely, there have been advances, but those advances are not as yet different in kind than those offered by the Fax machine.  Certainly, AI’s potential is higher than the Fax machine’s but the fact that we need to continually invoke “AI” suggests that the potential remains just that- potential.  When it is kinetic, we will start mentioning it less. 

The same thing happened about fifteen years ago with “Digital Marketing.”  The idea was to suggest that the current forms of marketing – print, TV, outdoor, events (and others)- were outmoded; that internet advertising and marketing were the key to the future.   With that change, the new role--“Digital Marketer” -- was invented.

That role was always curious to me.  Surely, there were people who ONLY did “Digital Marketing “but isn’t that a very limiting way to look at the multi-modal, multifarious, multi-headed beast that is Marketing?   Did we, five years before that, call anyone a “Fax Marketer?” 

In the tech world, we tend to see every change as something fundamental, something that subsumes all of reality and renders that which went before useless.  Marketers of today love to talk about X or Y as “dead.”  I have heard “Print is Dead” so many times that I no longer even peer above my magazine or newspaper to acknowledge it.  I have heard “Events are Dead” so many times that I no longer think twice about it before booking flights for the fifteen or so events I attend a year. 

In 2024, that new technology is AI.  AI is said to be able to “kill” or “replace” everything, to usher in a sea change in every aspect of life.

Reality or PR hype? Remember the Fax machine?