It's 2018, Why are We Still Using The Fax Machine

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"Signing day is one of those days when you can immediately tell how old you are and how young other people are," 51-year-old Gus Malzahn said to me on the first Wednesday of February two years ago. "The young guys on my staff, once a year they're standing around the fax machine like, 'Hey man, how do we turn this thing on?'"

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"I like getting those faxes," Duke head coach David Cutcliffe admits. "I guess it would be easy to say, 'Well, he just likes getting his cup of coffee and standing there waiting on the first faxes to come in because Coach, you know, he's old.' But the truth is that everybody finds some thrill in it. That includes the kids who are sticking that letter in the other end and watching it head on out to the school he's chosen. I've been coaching 35 years now. Seeing a surprise letter come out of my fax machine on the other end? That's never gotten old."

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According to FaxAuthority.com ("your online guide to frustrating technology"), facsimile transmission technology has existed since the early 1840s, roughly 35 years before the first college football game between Rutgers and Princeton. That's when British inventor Alexander Bain, grandfather of the electric clock, synced up two pendulums and passed a message between them. Over the next century, inventors figured out how to send photographs and whole documents, first via telegraph and then by telephone, but the industry never captured the public's fancy, not even when Steve McQueen blew audiences' minds by receiving info via fax in 1968's "Bullitt."

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