Historical information

In the late 1970s, the must-have gadget in every forest office could be best characterised by the fax machine.

Millions of people bought them because they represented a miracle.

With a fax machine, you could send a sheet of paper to someone, anywhere in the country, or anywhere in the world, complete with a signature, in seconds.

E-mail really didn't exist yet (except in military and university environments), so the fax machine was simply amazing.

During the "golden age" of the fax machine, people faxed everything. Office lunch orders went to the local Chinese takeaway by fax rather than being phoned in, while fire maps, timesheets and other urgent documents, could all be sent out straight away. Nearly every legal document got faxed once it was signed.

People also traded recipes, jokes, funny pictures and personal letters by fax rather than sending them in the snail mail.

With the early machines, the output was printed onto a roll of thermal paper that regularly spewed out coils onto the floor if you weren’t watching.

All this technology quickly faded, only to be superceded by the pervasive e-mail in the 1990s.

But the humble fax machine gave us an early glimpse of what the office of the future would be like.

Physical description

Facsimile machine

Inscriptions & markings

Pitney Bowes 8050