There isn’t a lot to this story beyond the fact that in around 1990 I helped debug someone’s Lotus 1-2-3 set up via fax. But it’s a good reminder of how important the Zeroth Law of Debugging is (see below).
Without some sort of online connection with these folks, and with transatlantic phone calls being very, very expensive (I was in the UK, they were in the US) fax was the obvious answer.
↫ John Graham
Honestly, this would still be easier today than some of the bug reporting systems I’ve seen.
I appreciate that long distance was very expensive, but this was also the era for AOl/prodigy/compuserve/and tons of BBS systems, typically with local dial in numbers. Those would have been an option too. Although I suppose average people may have been more familiar with faxing back then. As a kid I knew of some BBS systems that had email, but I didn’t know anybody to email, haha.
My mother still uses Lotus 1-2-3 and can input on the IBM m-series keyboard at a pace unrivaled by most humans. I love my mom, but she is old, and we can never teach people to do this again on a general level.
I’ll admit when I first saw the article title, my brain went to the horrifying concept of an actual remote debugger using fax as a transport.