History
Junk faxing came into widespread use in the late 1980s as a result of the development and proliferation of relatively inexpensive desktop fax machines which resulted in rapid growth in the number of fax machines in the U.S. The invention of the computer-based fax board in 1985 by Dr. Hank Magnuski, founder of GammaLink, provided an efficient platform for reaching those fax machines with minimal cost and effort.
The fax machines of this period typically used expensive thermal paper and a common complaint about junk faxes was that they consumed that expensive paper without permission, thus shifting the cost of printing the advertisement to the recipient.
In the U.S., the passage of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act in 1991 along with action by individual states reduced the use of junk faxes at that time. However, by the late 1990s junk faxing had once again become a widespread problem in the U.S., with the entry of a number of large-scale fax broadcasters such as fax.com who boasted of the capacity to send millions of fax advertisements per day. Because the legal restrictions of fax advertising are more widely known today, junk faxes are now predominately used in connection with disreputable or fly-by-night marketers.
Read more about this topic: Junk Fax
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.”
—William Burroughs (b. 1914)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)