With the advent of superfast DSL-based Internet connections, leased lines and DVD-ROMs, you would think that there is little room for the humble fax machine any more.

Thousands of documents can be compressed onto a USB stick. Hundreds of hours of video can be downloaded onto an array of hard drives in a matter of hours. DVD and Blue Ray discs can fit more graphics, text, sound and video on one disc than we ever thought was possible a few years ago.

Indeed there is a famous quote from Bill Gates where he thought “640k of memory should be enough for anybody”. And yet even the computer I write this upon has 4GB installed, around 75 times as much!

But in this world of high-tech, high capacity, high-speed content delivery systems, there is still a need to be able to access the images associated with paper-based documentation. All our technology has yet to eliminate the staple of how we identify ourselves in a legal manner: our signature.

And more often than not, it is this requirement, along with identification documents, that are needed when we fax. Contracts are written on paper and then signed in the presence of witnesses with a ballpoint pen. We may use a computer to type these contracts and we can even take pictures, but the purposes of acting in a legal capacity, a replica of the document and the signature is required.

Faxes provided the way to transmit and receive replicas of contracts, passports, driver’s licenses and other official signed documentation at high speed. Its installation all over the world will take some time to die out, it ever does. Consider that we have had VoIP for over 10 years, yet telephones still persist.

I imagine faxes will not die out, but merely evolve, becoming the paper based front-end to our digital communication systems.

To see where we are in the world of faxing software, click here now.