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Week 2: Pre-web technologies vs the web

Fax

Fax or facsimile or telecopying is the telephonic transmission of scanned-in printed material, which used to be a popular way of sending printed pictures and documents wirelessly to others. It was in 1843 when a Scottish inventor and mechanic named Alexander Bain received a British patent for his invention - “improvements in producing and regulating electric currents and improvements in timepieces and in electric printing and signal telegraphs.” But later on an English physicist, Frederick Bakewell improved Bain's invention, which was much more similar to the fax machines that we have today. 

Although the concept of fax comes from the 1800s, fax machines and faxing didn't become widespread until the 1980s, when it became more inexpensive. But as technology has evolved, fax has become obsolete as it has become outdated and ineffective compared to the digital alternatives that we have now. As fax has built-in security flaws and excessively wastes resources like paper it really has no place in the everyday home and work environment.

C

An example of pre-web technology that survived the web and actually became even more popular since then is the programming language C. It was developed between 1972 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie in Bell Labs, initially to be used in UNIX operating system. It was derived from previous languages like B and BCPL, so it has lot of the same features.

Despite being published decades ago, C is still widely used today, especially the variations of C like C# and C++. C is still the most used programming language throughout time, and as of January 2021, C was even ranked first in the TIOBE index which is a programming community index that measures the popularity of programming languages. If you compare C to other languages evolved from it, it isn't nearly as bloated as the others, it's fairly straightforward, it has great performance and most importantly it was developed to work with the hardware of a system so you have a lot of control over what is going on. 



Sources: 
https://www.javatpoint.com/history-of-c-language
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3402023/why-the-c-programming-language-still-rules.html

https://faxauthority.com/fax-history/
https://www.efax.co.uk/blog/is-fax-obsolete
https://www.britannica.com/technology/fax

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