For years, facsimile machine users were lonely pioneers with few people out there able to talk to them, but plummeting prices caused by saturation by Japanese suppliers of their home market (since most Japanese messages are hand-scripted, fax is a vastly more attractive communications medium than telex, which can’t code the ideograms Japanese people prefer to read, so there was great pressure to perfect the technology there), have caused an explosion of sales in the US and Europe, and now within days of putting in their first fax machine, many businesses wonder how they ever lived without it: in the US, some 460,000 fax machines were installed in 1987, estimates CAP International of Marshfield, Massachusetts, up from 190,000 in 1986, and the outlook in 1988 is for 50% to 100% growth, with installations running at a million a year for several years from the early 1990s.
