Re: universal character sets

[Nathaniel Borenstein <nsb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Excerpts from internet.ietf-smtp: 9-Apr-91 Re: universal character sets
Erik M. van der Poel@sra (184)

> Mark Crispin writes:
> > Internet e-mail will never replace FAX,

> True.

> > but FAX might very well replace Internet e-mail if we continue
> > down this garden path.

> I doubt it.

If you look at the relative growth curves,  you might doubt less.  More
and more often, I'm seeing mail that is CC'ed to someone at a fax
gateway, i.e. to someone's fax machine.  A growing number of PC people
send mail via fax boards that convert their text mail and transmit it as
a fax to someone else's PC fax board, where, if a clear and understood
font is used, OCR hardware or software manages to reconvert the whole
thing back into text.  Amazing but true.  If we botch things badly
enough, I believe that fax will bury email.  For more arguments, you
might want to check out my paper, "Why Do People Prefer FAX to EMail?"
in the proceedings of last fall's IFIP WG 6.5 MHS '90 Conference in
Zurich.  -- Nathaniel