[wiml]

I think that was a common and pretty simple thing to do back when businesses still had modems and POTS lines — there were several popular FOSS and commercial solutions for setting up your own local fax gateway (print-to-outgoing-fax and incoming-fax-to-email being how I remember them working). By the late 90s most consumer modems could handle faxes.

I think the persistence of the fax is almost entirely a social problem, not a technical one. This article links to another, which contained this statement I found fascinating:

> Lately, doctors have taken to hand-delivering the most important records. > > “We used to fax the labor and delivery records, but they didn’t get > them or they were misplacing them,” says Hilda Moreno, who manages > the office’s medical records. “We kept getting calls like, did you > send this? And we’d say we did. So we started printing them out.”