Back in 1991, the Baby Bells were predicting an explosion of landlines and a corresponding shortage of phone numbers because “everyone will need a fax machine.” Phone companies offered to lease fax machines for “only (US)$60 a month on a three-year contract.” Newspapers were offering early faxes of their main stories to subscribers for a buck a day. Every office supply store had shelf after shelf of fax machines for home and office use.
All those dreams got trashed by the Internet and cheap computers. Email attachments killed the fax machine boom. Today a fax “machine” is a $1 chip in a laptop, and like the modem chip, nobody even bothers to configure it. Faxing the newspaper? Newspapers are dropping like old news, and paywalls are mostly money-losers. Even those cries of “mom, we need a second line for the Internet” are just a dim memory. Instead of two, three or four landlines, many homes now have none. Indeed, many existing “landlines” are actually VoIP phones.
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