@@Immadeus Also helps the podcast is legitimately interesting and well put together. Bernie and Cybershell have a good chemistry together, and it's just fun listening to them ramble on.
This reminds me of how what we now call "ASCII art" actually predated the ASCII standard in the form of art people were making on typewriters in the 1800's.
Weird realization my grandad has faxlore up in his computer room at his house a printed out picture of Garfield lounging on the beach holding a sign that says "a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part"
Hello Cybershell, Patron Suzanne, here. Yes, I am old and Boomer enough to know about fax machines and worked with them in the early 2000s as an office junior. I also printed off some GameFAQs guides on Silent Hill, Tomb Raider and MGS around 2000-2002 in my first office job when the boss wasn't looking. What a rebel. I am not a RUclipsr and not planning to go for a career change but as a little project in my own time, I'm documenting my memories of BBC Micro computer games, the ones I remember from the mid-80s to early 90s before I got a Mega Drive and Sonic took over! It's probably too old and primitive for you but you but if my essays ever do make it to RUclips I'll let you know 😂
@Cybershell - the direction of my RUclips channel has changed to hamster vids for now... but I still plan to cover some ollllld retro games and software at some point! youtube.com/@SoozeC?feature=share8
UNIRONICALLY as someone WITH autism the energies cybershell gives off are basically how I wanna be when I infodump about stuff. You can tell they have just so much intrest and passion about a lot of the things they talk about and its infectious
@Pepper Millers This may sound odd, but I have run into your profile two times today on two completely different videos. This video and then on an DeusEx ost upload. Love your profile picture, it’s very distinct. What a small world :^) I hope this is not a creepy post, I just thought it was neat to run into the same person more then once.
Cybershell mentioned not knowing how to do a fax loop, I believe they would actually tape the top and bottom of the all black page so the machine would keep reading the same page over and over again.
You could also just load up the feeder tray with a stack of black paper. It would need to be reloaded, and might need modification to hold enough paper, but it would work all the same.
I'm in my early 20s and the only reason I had ever even seen a fax machine was because I grew up in a nowhere town where businesses and schools just didn't have the budget for new tech or everyone working there was so old that they refused to learn the new tech. I remember my grandpa had a whole bunch of these fax meme images all over his desk and walls along with his bulky early 90s computer. Sometimes he'd ask me to work the printer so he could hand out copies of them to people at our church.
As someone from 1999… it’s really weird to see people who are only a couple years younger or the same age not know old tech at all 💀 Or to have barely seen it. Like I was using Windows XP until 2012 so I have quite a history with it and really vivid longterm memorys of CRTs etc.
I've got some faxlore for you. My mother worked as a nurse when fax machine adoption kicked off. When I was in my teens I distinctly remember moments where she'd pull 5 or 6 pieces of paper out of her purse and gave them to me to look at. They were copies of the previous day's shitposts to their office. You had shitty comics and just flat out demented rambling essays written by disgruntled outpatient types. One of my favorites was this really crusty looking comic where some blob monster guy is sitting down eating some cereal and his fat, horrible disgusting looking wife asks him, "Watcha eatin'?" The cereal box has Nut'n'bich printed on it. It's 1 panel. It was titled "How arguments get started."
Holy shit, you're totally right. 100% the ancestor of that meme template. Kind of an unrelated tangent, but it's funny how the Virgin vs Chad meme is so popular only recently, because when you look at recent history you see alot of propaganda depicting a favorable member of society as a handsome rugged chad oozing masculinity and the unfavorable character a weak chin beta male who is either fat and sweaty or small and weak. You can see alot of these examples in communist and nazi propaganda during World War 2. So the idea of society projecting its best qualities onto caricatures of giga chads is really nothing new, it's almost ingrained into the human psyche lol.
@@xenodroid what's funny, and what a lot of people aren't aware of, is the virgin vs chad was originally the reverse of what it was now. Originally the virgin-walk had a lot of relatable things on it, 9 times out of 10 the person looking at the image did at least one of them and the point of the image was to bait them into replying. Then the chad was made and all his features and actions while walking were over the top and goofy, stuff nobody did and the joke was how outlandish the chad was. But then it quickly warped into your basic Thing I Don't Like vs Thing I Like meme once the broader Internet got ahold of it.
The template of the "drawing of caricature with annotations" is probably as old as the printing press. One I can think of is a temperance movement leaflet where the abstaining men looks like the bearded Nordic and the gin drinking man looks like a coomer.
My mom used to scream at my dad whenever he would flash his headlights to alert another car that their lights were off. "Don't you know that they might be a gang??" I wonder if she has any faxlore to share...
Love the bit towards the end where they are both trying to cosign the fax backdoor hack for being sick, then immediately backtracking remembering what he did using said backdoor, and then immediately forgetting again. God bless
As someone who briefly was really studying folklore at an academic level, and even did a presentation on fax/early netlore specifically, this was really fun to listen to.
23:00 I am in my thirties, I remember as a kid in the 90s, my mom talking about "don't flash your headlights at cars with 1 headlight because gang members are looking for victims and will chase you down." So crazy to get some backstory on a weird urban legend.
what's funny is i see people flashing their brights at people w their headlights off at night all the time. you know, bc they just forgot they have them off bc they're drunk or something lmao
My mom told me that shit too and I'm like . Man people are really gullible. She also told me to watch out for random women at the club kissing you and giving you drugs mouth to mouth . I'm just like.. mom I appreciate you think random women would walk up and kiss me but that doesn't really happen. I mean one high woman kissed me in the cheek and said "don't sit alone in the corner " and walked away but. She was just rolling her ass off. Not trying to drug me lol
I'm actually a folklore masters student and you actually stumbled across a missing link in the field so to speak, Internet folklore/fax lore was largely discounted by academics until the early 2000s due to the work of Trevor blank. So to hear that people discussing this in the 1970s, by big names such as Alan's dundes is super surprising. Its like stumbling across a missing link.
Fax machines date back to the 1800s which is crazy to think about. Also, it isn't really sound data that is being sent. It's just that the data is analog and so it exists as an electromagnetic wave traveling down the wire so a speaker (like one in a phone) would reproduce the data as sound. There really isn't any sort of file format or anything like that in the world of analog, you only have the raw data.
I'm leaving a comment just to vouch for more research and discussion into Faxlore. My brother and I always had a weird, ongoing joke surrounding fax machines being obsolete tech and saying that we'd fax over information to each other whenever we had a question for one another. We'd absolutely lose it whenever we saw an actual fax machine in public, and the culmination of the bit was finding a $3 fax machine at an army surplus store that we frequented and buying only that. From that point, fax machines became a unit of monetary measurements for us, like saying that a $60 game costed 20 fax machines, or remarking how many fax machines it would take to buy a house in the current market. The $3 fax machine sits in storage to this day, I oughta try and use it sometime.
The government actually does commission companies to make custom updates and whatnot. The Navy still uses Windows XP on a lot of their systems because it's cheaper to pay Microsoft to make custom patches than it is to replace everything. They have tried, but not all of the stuff they have running on those computers was successfully updated. So they stick with it. I used to work for a tech company that did contract work for the government. Our gold standard for web application development was that it HAD to run on Internet Explorer. Even though it had been replaced by Edge at that point and also was in the process of being patched out of Windows entirely. EDIT: On the note of VR, that's not a new technology. It was invented in the 1968. Which just goes to show how ahead of its time it was and arguably still is.
I had to use a fax machine when I worked at a newspaper in 2012. 2012! It was so archaic that I have no idea how I ever was able to get things done with it.
Please make more Faxlore episodes, this is such an interesting and obscure topic that no one else is producing content about. There is an audience for this. It may not be the same as for other videos but I would bet they’re just as large
I had an office admin job a few years ago where fax machines were still in use. Like an earlier commenter mentioned, most modern fax machines will just send you an email with a PDF of the document attached. My coworkers would fax dumb drawings to each other all the time, it was fun! Scam faxes were common: at least once a week I would throw away ads for impossibly cheap printer ink, or free Carribean cruises.
I used to work as a manager for a retail store and the main thing we would get on our fax machine were scams. Pages offering insurance for our shop, but also pages saying our systems have been compromised and we should call a number to get it fixed. Fax Machines were one of the most advanced systems we used though as our computer system and how we recorded earnings was via an old computer that still ran on DOS.
You know usually when RUclipsrs talk unscripted they typically talk slower meanwhile Cybershell manages to speak a mile a minute without a script it's impressive
A fax loop is actually comically easy on certain devices. You literally just staple or tape a few pieces of paper together in a literal, physical loop which feeds the output back into the input
I'm old, not dead yet and remember people faxing jokes and propaganda. It felt like when your mom or grandma would forward chain email jokes. I specifically remember the "you want it when?" one and the presumably fake Mrs Fields chocolate chip cookie recipe.
i tried to do the phone thing but I kinda chickened out in the end because my only casette tape player was the talk boy and it was clunky to carry in public. but the movie, 'hackers' has a lot of really cool stuff, including phone phreaking to make free calls, hacking businesses and schools, wearing floppies like accessories, viruses, lots of old pc and tech stuff that you might find interesting. one of my favourite quotes 'this is insanely great, it has a 28.8 bps modem'. I'm old so I used fax machines a few times mostly in college
@@vxcvxmcrposfdsdfulpdfg I'm so terribly sorry I didn't listen to the cybershell's coked out ranting at .5x speed with captions on while taking enough notes to catch every little thing he said. A simple time stamp would've sufficed, you meany A simple
Worked in finance between 2009-2012, faxes are used all the time in banks. I'm not a faxwizard but I can confirm that getting bombed with black pages, obviously fake scams, and vacation package scam opportunities was a near daily annoyance, even for a location with a handful of employees.
Reminds me of old DIY 'Zine culture, which seemed to be alive until at least 2014 which is the last time I saw one. People would make their own magazines by taking other magazines and books and photos and stuff, and cutting them up and gluing them back together, and make an entire magazine that way, and then just photocopy it all and staple it together.
@@eltiolavara9 Do a google image search for "DIY Punk Zine" and you'll find a few examples. Cut-out text, copy-of-a-copy black and white photos, Sharpie marker. Most of it is 70's-80's radical anarcho-punk political rhetoric, but then in the 80's-90's there was a shift to music, and then it sort of vanished without a trace. Here in ohio there was a local one that followed the underground music scene, and where typically 20-30 pages each, and you could find them laying around in stacks of 10-20 at laudromats and record resellers. I don't have any physical examples, because it was never my scene, I just thought it looked aesthetically interesting. Ironically, the earlier soviet Samizdat, which predates punk zines, was the inspiration for punk zines, and was produced with lower tech, and was more criminal in the soviet union, managed to have a higher production quality, which is absolutely wild that the punk aesthetic involved a deliberately low quality standard, if it looked too good it was bad. Other stuff to look up is the cut-up technique, assemblage (composition), found poetry, and the musical equivalent 'Plunderphonics', and if you fall down the music rabbit hole, the KLF/JAMMs, which then connects to modern mash-up culture and even vaporwave. I have more music examples than print examples honestly.... like the emergency broadcast network. "comply" is probably my favorite of those. Technically daft punk and the prodigy fall into that school of music composition. Sorry that this comment went from talking about print media to music, but they're very connected subjects.
I used a fax machine for the first time in my 28 year old life 2 months ago to fax a copy of a paper invoice to a customer across town. This was also the same company that was using still using fucking DOS for their internal networks up until last year. Hearing the ancient internet dialup tone again in the wild was surreal.
US government tech usage summary: • Proprietary software for Windows 2000, last updated in 2007 (band-aid MacGyver patches only) • Hardware for Windows Vista, running Windows 11, and 3 separate antivirus softwares fighting each other • Rampant usage of fax machines Gobless the United States
They actively sell new fax machines dudes, it's not something of an ethereal "was it all a dream" kinda thing. To catch something faxed, other than accidental mistyping of the recipient, actual tapping of the line is required with a very specific skill set and on the field operations. Also the internet has the tendency to be every now and then off for some stupid reason, while the phone network is much more steady. So in the right hands it is in fact a good secure tool, with immediate physical copies of long term important stuff.
Commenting to show support for more Faxlore, this is really interesting-especially if there was actual “Fax Warfare” lol, I’d love to hear more about fax machines.
In the time between the last NETLORE and this one I watched all the other NETLOREs and all of Bernie's videos. Absolutely love the somewhat obscure topics you guys cover!
Not so sure about 'corporate warfare' usage, but my PoliSci teacher back in high school told us that they used the 'black paper' trick when he was working for a politician's campaign office in the 80s/90s. Specifically that they would tape the black pages into a loop and then initiate the fax late at night when there wouldn't be any staffers to stop it. That way too, there was no ink to receive any actually important early morning/overnight faxes before people went to work in the morning and replaced the toner. Also ordering a bunch of pizzas, because a campaign office getting 12 pizzas didn't stand out but also they couldn't refuse it in case it reflected poorly on the candidate.
This was somehow both nostalgic and eye opening to me. My dad would have alot of these on his cubicle in the office he worked at. I never knew where they came from. I didn't get most of them anyway so I didn't really care at the time but ones like that hit any key one are just burned into my brain because I saw it so much. I guess my dad must of really liked that one.
My boss is a clinical psychologist in her 70s, and to this day relies heavily on faxes for sending and receiving information (it's a private practice). There's an online service we have for sending faxes to and from e-mails, and I swear to god her favourite way of showing changes to a document is to print it out, mark the changes in ink using illegible writing, fax them to her e-mail, and then forwarded the e-mail from the efax service to the target. It's so many steps of extra work to me, but she swears by it. It's horrible to read and try and understand things when it's all obfuscated by black-and-white, mid-quality fax. Yes, I just got one of these earlier today and have been regularly for the past 10 years since I started working for her. And yes, technically it can skip the *complicated* step of attaching a file to an e-mail, which I think might be the biggest hangup. (I think navigating file systems is her bane, so anything that can avoid that step is considered worth it to speed up the process.)
so glad cybershell talked about this channel and helped me re discover bernievidz, ill be going through the videos i missed out on while i forgot to resub on this account! keep up the amazing work guysss
i'm training to be an archivist and a fax lore archive would rule. sadly unless individual people kept them they might be hard to find within corporations due to their records management practices. but they're an absolutely good example of ephemera that was never meant to survive long term!!! i wouldn't be surprised if they ended up in personal papers or maybe collected by someone who really liked them. this is how we still have so many pieces of random history.
I work in medical so I deal with faxes daily. What’s wild is you get the occasional ad for a local business pop in your machine. Seems dumb until you realize it’s mass advertising (punch in random numbers in nearby area codes) at the cost of one printed piece of paper. Also god forbid someone dials your phone number in a fax machine and you get jumpscared by the dial up noise.
I work in pharmacy and I can confirm we use fax machines on a daily basis. Granted, where I work now a lot of what we receive is through internet faxing now, which is basically just email with extra steps, but I've worked at other pharmacies as recently as 2021 that still did it the old fashioned way. Most of the Medical field is about 30 years behind the times honestly, the first pharmacy system I used was a DOS-based command line system. In 2016.
I work in pharmacy and we still use fax. Most faxes today are just glorified email, and we get most electronically now. But we do have to have an old school fax machine for backup purposes and it is hot garbage.
Yo! I actually have a shit ton of this stuff! My grandpa passed away and we inherited this manilla folder the size of a large textbook full of these off color jokes and scantily clad women. You guys want this stuff?
It'd be really cool if you scanned (or just took pictures of them) and uploaded them somewhere. Like imgur or a google drive folder. You could also email cybershell. I would like to know if you do that, so if you do please reply to this comment.
By the way, Samizdat (Самиздат, self-publishing) refers not only to ideological dissident pamphlets, but anything that wasn't published officially in general. For example, some of brothers Strugatsky works such as The Ugly Swans were manually retyped and passed between those initiated. That's also how it got to the West.
So I work in the dietary department of a nursing center and we use a fax machine to communicate information between departments. We get sent personalized meal tickets and resident updates via the fax machine. We get sent about 10-20+ faxes per day. That machine is always going. We also get random faxes from roofing companies and some shady guy who buys cars without titles
This is absolutely fascinating to me, would love to hear more. Also as a millennial who grew up hearing the flashing headlights story it's great to finally get the origins of it.
About that Micky Mouse Fantasia thing. Stickers used to be big in the 90s and I remember a lot of that particular Sticker of Micky Mouse doing a pose with his Apprentice garb on. I think it was one of those hoaxes to get people to rip up their Disney memorabilia. I was too young to know that for sure, but similar things happened via rumors and hoaxes around that time.
this was fantastic. the stuff at the end about sending faxes to thousands of unprotected computers makes me really want to see an episode of the show about old malware. stuff like the love letter worm and blaster that got really spread around.
Great episode, really love how humanity's inherent desire to shitpost can't even be hindered by such a niche, archeic form of technology. If I could be that asshole and recommend a possible topic of discussion in Cyber's wheelhouse, I was reminded of Spax3 earlier from another video I watched, and it jogged a previously buried memory of the war between him, Sonicdude3, and Vman9876543. Might be a fun topic to discuss.
That part at 39:00 hit hard, the other day I went into a little shop and they were running XP for their Point of sales system. Not POSready2009, just regular XP which dropped support back in 2014. It was a surreal experience
I used to walk past a cubicle with that PMS cat tacked to the wall every day for years. I left that job just a couple months ago. I had no idea I was staring at history this entire time.
Yessssss, I was hoping we'd get another episode soon!! To be honest - when I first read "FAXlore" I was half expecting the life story of another obscure internet figure I'd never heard of 😂
Doing my civic duty and saying that I support future faxlore episodes, and fax-related content. Seriously though, you guys make things interesting just by being excited to share them. Like, even if you aren't "the right guys" to explore a topic, you still do it justice. Which sounds cheesy, but I wouldn't watch if I thought this was boring! Keep up the good work lads.
Growing up we had a fax bc my mom needed it for work. I remember her yelling across the house not to pick up the phone, otherwise the fax wouldn’t come through and you’d hear that horrible banshee shriek
the overnight success of actually telling your audience about your podcast really worked.
It's because Cybershell posts so infrequently any more Cybershell content even in podcast form is welcome
@@Immadeus Also helps the podcast is legitimately interesting and well put together. Bernie and Cybershell have a good chemistry together, and it's just fun listening to them ramble on.
@@JacobJAMS2001 Yes this podcast is peak comfy.
also the secret strategy of posting content
Pretty sure he mentioned it in like a livestream or something, I remember watching some of his vods about a year ago and finding this channel.
This reminds me of how what we now call "ASCII art" actually predated the ASCII standard in the form of art people were making on typewriters in the 1800's.
Cybershell talks at 1.5x speed when he's not scripted lol.
this is the hyperfixation experience
Fr dude it's fucking nuts, if I didn't find it hilarious I'd probably hate it.
Gotta go fast.
I legitimately had to check my playback speed several times to make sure it wasn’t accidentally dialed up.
It is definitely faster than 1.5x.
Especially at 8:54
Weird realization my grandad has faxlore up in his computer room at his house a printed out picture of Garfield lounging on the beach holding a sign that says "a lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part"
Hello Cybershell, Patron Suzanne, here. Yes, I am old and Boomer enough to know about fax machines and worked with them in the early 2000s as an office junior. I also printed off some GameFAQs guides on Silent Hill, Tomb Raider and MGS around 2000-2002 in my first office job when the boss wasn't looking. What a rebel. I am not a RUclipsr and not planning to go for a career change but as a little project in my own time, I'm documenting my memories of BBC Micro computer games, the ones I remember from the mid-80s to early 90s before I got a Mega Drive and Sonic took over! It's probably too old and primitive for you but you but if my essays ever do make it to RUclips I'll let you know 😂
If there's anything to learn on RUclips, it's that there's at least a little audience for nearly anything.
@@ityabeanfr i’d watch
@Cybershell - the direction of my RUclips channel has changed to hamster vids for now... but I still plan to cover some ollllld retro games and software at some point! youtube.com/@SoozeC?feature=share8
I would love it if Cybershell watched my hamster vids!! 🤣🤣🐹🐹🤣🤣🤣🤣
That's very interesting! Could I ask, was faxing all that slow? Scanning, encoding, sending, receiving, printing, seems like it'd take a while lol
Cybershell’s mind is:
70% Sonic autism
29% retro internet autism
1% existential musings on the march of time
and that’s why we love him.
UNIRONICALLY as someone WITH autism the energies cybershell gives off are basically how I wanna be when I infodump about stuff. You can tell they have just so much intrest and passion about a lot of the things they talk about and its infectious
@@imserena3754 I don't like diagnosing other people, but when he fixates on something it kinda does feel sort of familiar lol
Terminally online teenagers try not to project perceived disorders onto everything challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
@@leinad3955 Thought he said it himself in a video before, tho
@@kiricappuchin I thought he was joking
Ironically enough Ken Penders is probably the sort of man who engaged in all kinds of faxlore
So true.
@Pepper Millers This may sound odd, but I have run into your profile two times today on two completely different videos. This video and then on an DeusEx ost upload.
Love your profile picture, it’s very distinct.
What a small world :^)
I hope this is not a creepy post, I just thought it was neat to run into the same person more then once.
@@jondoe6608 no worries, I too enjoy coming across the same people on the web sometimes.
I could listen to Cybershell talk for hours
He sounds like he just drank 15 cups of coffee. It's like listening on 1.5 speed, without having to change it lol
Same!
@@taben9jake true he speaks so fast here
I know right... I couldn't tell you why but the man just demands attention
@@taben9jake He speaks in run-on sentences
Cybershell mentioned not knowing how to do a fax loop, I believe they would actually tape the top and bottom of the all black page so the machine would keep reading the same page over and over again.
That was one of the ways.
You could also just load up the feeder tray with a stack of black paper. It would need to be reloaded, and might need modification to hold enough paper, but it would work all the same.
I'm in my early 20s and the only reason I had ever even seen a fax machine was because I grew up in a nowhere town where businesses and schools just didn't have the budget for new tech or everyone working there was so old that they refused to learn the new tech.
I remember my grandpa had a whole bunch of these fax meme images all over his desk and walls along with his bulky early 90s computer. Sometimes he'd ask me to work the printer so he could hand out copies of them to people at our church.
As someone from 1999… it’s really weird to see people who are only a couple years younger or the same age not know old tech at all 💀 Or to have barely seen it. Like I was using Windows XP until 2012 so I have quite a history with it and really vivid longterm memorys of CRTs etc.
@@idontcheckmynotifications yeah, i guess it depends on how fast you update
I've got some faxlore for you. My mother worked as a nurse when fax machine adoption kicked off. When I was in my teens I distinctly remember moments where she'd pull 5 or 6 pieces of paper out of her purse and gave them to me to look at. They were copies of the previous day's shitposts to their office. You had shitty comics and just flat out demented rambling essays written by disgruntled outpatient types. One of my favorites was this really crusty looking comic where some blob monster guy is sitting down eating some cereal and his fat, horrible disgusting looking wife asks him, "Watcha eatin'?" The cereal box has Nut'n'bich printed on it. It's 1 panel. It was titled "How arguments get started."
This is legitimately fascinating. That "secretary burnout" has chad/virgin meme energy, for example
"Time is a flat fucking circle" - Sun Tzu i think
Holy shit, you're totally right. 100% the ancestor of that meme template.
Kind of an unrelated tangent, but it's funny how the Virgin vs Chad meme is so popular only recently, because when you look at recent history you see alot of propaganda depicting a favorable member of society as a handsome rugged chad oozing masculinity and the unfavorable character a weak chin beta male who is either fat and sweaty or small and weak. You can see alot of these examples in communist and nazi propaganda during World War 2. So the idea of society projecting its best qualities onto caricatures of giga chads is really nothing new, it's almost ingrained into the human psyche lol.
@@xenodroid what's funny, and what a lot of people aren't aware of, is the virgin vs chad was originally the reverse of what it was now.
Originally the virgin-walk had a lot of relatable things on it, 9 times out of 10 the person looking at the image did at least one of them and the point of the image was to bait them into replying.
Then the chad was made and all his features and actions while walking were over the top and goofy, stuff nobody did and the joke was how outlandish the chad was.
But then it quickly warped into your basic Thing I Don't Like vs Thing I Like meme once the broader Internet got ahold of it.
The template of the "drawing of caricature with annotations" is probably as old as the printing press. One I can think of is a temperance movement leaflet where the abstaining men looks like the bearded Nordic and the gin drinking man looks like a coomer.
My mom used to scream at my dad whenever he would flash his headlights to alert another car that their lights were off. "Don't you know that they might be a gang??" I wonder if she has any faxlore to share...
It was also spread by office watercooler small talk, church group gossip, and the like.
ive seen recent Facebook memes and r/nosleep stories that parrot this myth so it seems like pretty persistent folklore.
i knew, if i listened to the last three podcasts on loop, a new one would magically appear
Thank you for your dedication
Love the bit towards the end where they are both trying to cosign the fax backdoor hack for being sick, then immediately backtracking remembering what he did using said backdoor, and then immediately forgetting again. God bless
i go back to this just to hear how fast and excitedly cybershell speaks because god damn me too man u tell em about those fax machines
As someone who briefly was really studying folklore at an academic level, and even did a presentation on fax/early netlore specifically, this was really fun to listen to.
23:00 I am in my thirties, I remember as a kid in the 90s, my mom talking about "don't flash your headlights at cars with 1 headlight because gang members are looking for victims and will chase you down." So crazy to get some backstory on a weird urban legend.
what's funny is i see people flashing their brights at people w their headlights off at night all the time. you know, bc they just forgot they have them off bc they're drunk or something lmao
My mom told me that shit too and I'm like . Man people are really gullible. She also told me to watch out for random women at the club kissing you and giving you drugs mouth to mouth .
I'm just like.. mom I appreciate you think random women would walk up and kiss me but that doesn't really happen.
I mean one high woman kissed me in the cheek and said "don't sit alone in the corner " and walked away but. She was just rolling her ass off. Not trying to drug me lol
I think it's funny that all the "fax memes" are office humor, because that's where they all were for the most part.
I'm actually a folklore masters student and you actually stumbled across a missing link in the field so to speak, Internet folklore/fax lore was largely discounted by academics until the early 2000s due to the work of Trevor blank. So to hear that people discussing this in the 1970s, by big names such as Alan's dundes is super surprising. Its like stumbling across a missing link.
i remember when the whole anonymous vs scientology thing was going on people were sending all black faxes to scientology headquarters
Fax machines date back to the 1800s which is crazy to think about. Also, it isn't really sound data that is being sent. It's just that the data is analog and so it exists as an electromagnetic wave traveling down the wire so a speaker (like one in a phone) would reproduce the data as sound. There really isn't any sort of file format or anything like that in the world of analog, you only have the raw data.
This podcast always scratches my particular itch of niche knowledge. Glad to see it's still going, great work as always!
Cybershell’s whole channel does that for me
I'm leaving a comment just to vouch for more research and discussion into Faxlore. My brother and I always had a weird, ongoing joke surrounding fax machines being obsolete tech and saying that we'd fax over information to each other whenever we had a question for one another. We'd absolutely lose it whenever we saw an actual fax machine in public, and the culmination of the bit was finding a $3 fax machine at an army surplus store that we frequented and buying only that. From that point, fax machines became a unit of monetary measurements for us, like saying that a $60 game costed 20 fax machines, or remarking how many fax machines it would take to buy a house in the current market. The $3 fax machine sits in storage to this day, I oughta try and use it sometime.
Sounds like you and your brother had the time of your life
That bleenkenlights joke actually sounds like something modern-day middle-aged German office workers would share on WhatsApp
The government actually does commission companies to make custom updates and whatnot. The Navy still uses Windows XP on a lot of their systems because it's cheaper to pay Microsoft to make custom patches than it is to replace everything. They have tried, but not all of the stuff they have running on those computers was successfully updated. So they stick with it.
I used to work for a tech company that did contract work for the government. Our gold standard for web application development was that it HAD to run on Internet Explorer. Even though it had been replaced by Edge at that point and also was in the process of being patched out of Windows entirely.
EDIT: On the note of VR, that's not a new technology. It was invented in the 1968. Which just goes to show how ahead of its time it was and arguably still is.
I had to use a fax machine when I worked at a newspaper in 2012. 2012! It was so archaic that I have no idea how I ever was able to get things done with it.
That graphic of the duck with the hammer is definitely pinned up somewhere in my office... The faxlore runs so deep, it's all around us.
Please make more Faxlore episodes, this is such an interesting and obscure topic that no one else is producing content about.
There is an audience for this. It may not be the same as for other videos but I would bet they’re just as large
I had an office admin job a few years ago where fax machines were still in use. Like an earlier commenter mentioned, most modern fax machines will just send you an email with a PDF of the document attached. My coworkers would fax dumb drawings to each other all the time, it was fun! Scam faxes were common: at least once a week I would throw away ads for impossibly cheap printer ink, or free Carribean cruises.
I used to work as a manager for a retail store and the main thing we would get on our fax machine were scams. Pages offering insurance for our shop, but also pages saying our systems have been compromised and we should call a number to get it fixed. Fax Machines were one of the most advanced systems we used though as our computer system and how we recorded earnings was via an old computer that still ran on DOS.
I'm so glad this podcast is back at full force, it's so excellent and such a nice surprise as someone who found it when it was in its hibernation era
Dude I would watch the hell out of fax lore as a series. Love all your guys stuff.
You know usually when RUclipsrs talk unscripted they typically talk slower meanwhile Cybershell manages to speak a mile a minute without a script it's impressive
A fax loop is actually comically easy on certain devices. You literally just staple or tape a few pieces of paper together in a literal, physical loop which feeds the output back into the input
Mickey at 21:05 is literally doing the Chad Stride
I'm old, not dead yet and remember people faxing jokes and propaganda. It felt like when your mom or grandma would forward chain email jokes. I specifically remember the "you want it when?" one and the presumably fake Mrs Fields chocolate chip cookie recipe.
i tried to do the phone thing but I kinda chickened out in the end because my only casette tape player was the talk boy and it was clunky to carry in public.
but the movie, 'hackers' has a lot of really cool stuff, including phone phreaking to make free calls, hacking businesses and schools, wearing floppies like accessories, viruses, lots of old pc and tech stuff that you might find interesting. one of my favourite quotes 'this is insanely great, it has a 28.8 bps modem'.
I'm old so I used fax machines a few times mostly in college
I love that you're explaining a fax machine, I feel old now, thanks.
And these are 30 year Olds explaining it not even people in their 20s
@@greenoftreeblackofblue6625 holy shit, cybershell is in his 30s? No way
@@Yixdy he literally fuckin says in this exact video that hes in his 30s
@@vxcvxmcrposfdsdfulpdfg I'm so terribly sorry I didn't listen to the cybershell's coked out ranting at .5x speed with captions on while taking enough notes to catch every little thing he said.
A simple time stamp would've sufficed, you meany
A simple
HELL YEAH I DIDNT THINK THIS WOULD CONTINUE
I STILL DON'T QUITE BELIEVE IT WILL CONTINUE
@@TheUnnamedGent ME NEITHER TO BE HONEST
Worked in finance between 2009-2012, faxes are used all the time in banks.
I'm not a faxwizard but I can confirm that getting bombed with black pages, obviously fake scams, and vacation package scam opportunities was a near daily annoyance, even for a location with a handful of employees.
This was great to drive home to. This was weirder than I thought it would be.
Reminds me of old DIY 'Zine culture, which seemed to be alive until at least 2014 which is the last time I saw one. People would make their own magazines by taking other magazines and books and photos and stuff, and cutting them up and gluing them back together, and make an entire magazine that way, and then just photocopy it all and staple it together.
that's insane, do you have any cool examples in particular? sounds really cool and ive never heard of it
@@eltiolavara9 Do a google image search for "DIY Punk Zine" and you'll find a few examples. Cut-out text, copy-of-a-copy black and white photos, Sharpie marker. Most of it is 70's-80's radical anarcho-punk political rhetoric, but then in the 80's-90's there was a shift to music, and then it sort of vanished without a trace. Here in ohio there was a local one that followed the underground music scene, and where typically 20-30 pages each, and you could find them laying around in stacks of 10-20 at laudromats and record resellers. I don't have any physical examples, because it was never my scene, I just thought it looked aesthetically interesting. Ironically, the earlier soviet Samizdat, which predates punk zines, was the inspiration for punk zines, and was produced with lower tech, and was more criminal in the soviet union, managed to have a higher production quality, which is absolutely wild that the punk aesthetic involved a deliberately low quality standard, if it looked too good it was bad. Other stuff to look up is the cut-up technique, assemblage (composition), found poetry, and the musical equivalent 'Plunderphonics', and if you fall down the music rabbit hole, the KLF/JAMMs, which then connects to modern mash-up culture and even vaporwave. I have more music examples than print examples honestly.... like the emergency broadcast network. "comply" is probably my favorite of those. Technically daft punk and the prodigy fall into that school of music composition.
Sorry that this comment went from talking about print media to music, but they're very connected subjects.
@eltiolavara9 iirc one of the first fanfictions was a star trek slash fic published in a 70s trekkie fan zine.
I used a fax machine for the first time in my 28 year old life 2 months ago to fax a copy of a paper invoice to a customer across town. This was also the same company that was using still using fucking DOS for their internal networks up until last year.
Hearing the ancient internet dialup tone again in the wild was surreal.
Old tech was so amazing, imagine sending someone an ENTIRE document on something that has a phone integrated on it
US government tech usage summary:
• Proprietary software for Windows 2000, last updated in 2007 (band-aid MacGyver patches only)
• Hardware for Windows Vista, running Windows 11, and 3 separate antivirus softwares fighting each other
• Rampant usage of fax machines
Gobless the United States
They actively sell new fax machines dudes, it's not something of an ethereal "was it all a dream" kinda thing. To catch something faxed, other than accidental mistyping of the recipient, actual tapping of the line is required with a very specific skill set and on the field operations. Also the internet has the tendency to be every now and then off for some stupid reason, while the phone network is much more steady. So in the right hands it is in fact a good secure tool, with immediate physical copies of long term important stuff.
Commenting to show support for more Faxlore, this is really interesting-especially if there was actual “Fax Warfare” lol, I’d love to hear more about fax machines.
“issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the nazi fax hacker. you do not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to them"”
In the time between the last NETLORE and this one I watched all the other NETLOREs and all of Bernie's videos. Absolutely love the somewhat obscure topics you guys cover!
I was an attorney for a decade, and in one state I practiced in, everyone filed everything via fax because the electronic filing system was so broken
I'm pogging. I pogged. I have pogged. I will be pogging in the future. NEW NET LORE
Ahh yes, the next netlore will be about alphabet agencies.
This one basically is
I feel like shell's talking speed is in 1.5 while Bernie's in 0.5. I really love this podcast
Not so sure about 'corporate warfare' usage, but my PoliSci teacher back in high school told us that they used the 'black paper' trick when he was working for a politician's campaign office in the 80s/90s. Specifically that they would tape the black pages into a loop and then initiate the fax late at night when there wouldn't be any staffers to stop it. That way too, there was no ink to receive any actually important early morning/overnight faxes before people went to work in the morning and replaced the toner. Also ordering a bunch of pizzas, because a campaign office getting 12 pizzas didn't stand out but also they couldn't refuse it in case it reflected poorly on the candidate.
How Alinskian. Sounds like your average PoliSci teacher, alright.
Love the manic, borderline delirious energy
This makes me wanna get myself and my friends fax machines so we can send each other modern meme bullshit in physical form
This was somehow both nostalgic and eye opening to me. My dad would have alot of these on his cubicle in the office he worked at. I never knew where they came from. I didn't get most of them anyway so I didn't really care at the time but ones like that hit any key one are just burned into my brain because I saw it so much. I guess my dad must of really liked that one.
My boss is a clinical psychologist in her 70s, and to this day relies heavily on faxes for sending and receiving information (it's a private practice). There's an online service we have for sending faxes to and from e-mails, and I swear to god her favourite way of showing changes to a document is to print it out, mark the changes in ink using illegible writing, fax them to her e-mail, and then forwarded the e-mail from the efax service to the target. It's so many steps of extra work to me, but she swears by it. It's horrible to read and try and understand things when it's all obfuscated by black-and-white, mid-quality fax.
Yes, I just got one of these earlier today and have been regularly for the past 10 years since I started working for her. And yes, technically it can skip the *complicated* step of attaching a file to an e-mail, which I think might be the biggest hangup. (I think navigating file systems is her bane, so anything that can avoid that step is considered worth it to speed up the process.)
The Soviet Union’s equivalent to Catch-22 was originally published in this way, probably the most potent samizdat shitpost.
I love learning about esoteric slavlore.
Warlockracy rocks for that exact reason, among others.
@@audiosurfarchivewarlockracy enjoyer located🫡
so glad cybershell talked about this channel and helped me re discover bernievidz, ill be going through the videos i missed out on while i forgot to resub on this account! keep up the amazing work guysss
29.21 we love this video it's super fucking interesting!
In this podcast: 30 year olds who are absolutely terrified of a hypothetical 50 year old who might tell them more about a topic they're interested in
Netlore have this weird actual oldschool radio show with dj's and stuff vibe to it, and i absolutely love it.
the podcast has gone from taxlore to faxlore, incredible.
i'm training to be an archivist and a fax lore archive would rule. sadly unless individual people kept them they might be hard to find within corporations due to their records management practices. but they're an absolutely good example of ephemera that was never meant to survive long term!!! i wouldn't be surprised if they ended up in personal papers or maybe collected by someone who really liked them. this is how we still have so many pieces of random history.
That “Cause God Don’t Make No Junk” image was in my Primary school holy shit. Like same kid and all.
I work in medical so I deal with faxes daily. What’s wild is you get the occasional ad for a local business pop in your machine. Seems dumb until you realize it’s mass advertising (punch in random numbers in nearby area codes) at the cost of one printed piece of paper. Also god forbid someone dials your phone number in a fax machine and you get jumpscared by the dial up noise.
Love your series so much I'm going back and watching old ones. Keep it up guys!
I work in pharmacy and I can confirm we use fax machines on a daily basis.
Granted, where I work now a lot of what we receive is through internet faxing now, which is basically just email with extra steps, but I've worked at other pharmacies as recently as 2021 that still did it the old fashioned way.
Most of the Medical field is about 30 years behind the times honestly, the first pharmacy system I used was a DOS-based command line system. In 2016.
I work in pharmacy and we still use fax. Most faxes today are just glorified email, and we get most electronically now. But we do have to have an old school fax machine for backup purposes and it is hot garbage.
And sadly I have never received a fax anything like faxlore. All of the unsolicited faxes we receive now are just business loan offers.
More NETLORE! Love this series! I could listen to you two talk for hours about the more obscure stuff.
KEEP THIS GOING CYBERSHELL THIS PODCAST IS LIQUID GOLD
Yo! I actually have a shit ton of this stuff! My grandpa passed away and we inherited this manilla folder the size of a large textbook full of these off color jokes and scantily clad women. You guys want this stuff?
bonus points if you fax it to them (especially since they don't have one right now)
It'd be really cool if you scanned (or just took pictures of them) and uploaded them somewhere. Like imgur or a google drive folder. You could also email cybershell. I would like to know if you do that, so if you do please reply to this comment.
Scan it and stick it up on the Internet Archive!
It's nice to know Trolling has always existed.
this podcast covers the whole spectrum from Tax to Fax.
By the way, Samizdat (Самиздат, self-publishing) refers not only to ideological dissident pamphlets, but anything that wasn't published officially in general. For example, some of brothers Strugatsky works such as The Ugly Swans were manually retyped and passed between those initiated. That's also how it got to the West.
Would unironically watch a continuation of this episode further down the line. It’s fascinating.
So I work in the dietary department of a nursing center and we use a fax machine to communicate information between departments. We get sent personalized meal tickets and resident updates via the fax machine. We get sent about 10-20+ faxes per day. That machine is always going. We also get random faxes from roofing companies and some shady guy who buys cars without titles
This is absolutely fascinating to me, would love to hear more. Also as a millennial who grew up hearing the flashing headlights story it's great to finally get the origins of it.
You, the Bernie
It's kinda cool hearing Cybershell talk fast when he's clearly invested in something and having a good time.
About that Micky Mouse Fantasia thing. Stickers used to be big in the 90s and I remember a lot of that particular Sticker of Micky Mouse doing a pose with his Apprentice garb on. I think it was one of those hoaxes to get people to rip up their Disney memorabilia. I was too young to know that for sure, but similar things happened via rumors and hoaxes around that time.
I listened a little further, it totally felt like that Satanic Panic or any other drug scare. No fantasia lsd stickers lol
Cybershell's fax enthusiasm and later disdain was a wild ride to witness.
this was fantastic. the stuff at the end about sending faxes to thousands of unprotected computers makes me really want to see an episode of the show about old malware. stuff like the love letter worm and blaster that got really spread around.
Great episode, really love how humanity's inherent desire to shitpost can't even be hindered by such a niche, archeic form of technology.
If I could be that asshole and recommend a possible topic of discussion in Cyber's wheelhouse, I was reminded of Spax3 earlier from another video I watched, and it jogged a previously buried memory of the war between him, Sonicdude3, and Vman9876543. Might be a fun topic to discuss.
this is so awesome PLEASE more fax machine lore
i honestly would not be mad if you made a pt 2 of faxlore, pre-internet internet culture is so interesting
That part at 39:00 hit hard, the other day I went into a little shop and they were running XP for their Point of sales system. Not POSready2009, just regular XP which dropped support back in 2014. It was a surreal experience
I used to walk past a cubicle with that PMS cat tacked to the wall every day for years. I left that job just a couple months ago. I had no idea I was staring at history this entire time.
time stamp?
Anything modern folklore related is great to be covered on this podcast, fax lore counts and isn't boring at all.
netlore merch selling the mickey acid as a sticker would be so good
Yessssss, I was hoping we'd get another episode soon!!
To be honest - when I first read "FAXlore" I was half expecting the life story of another obscure internet figure I'd never heard of 😂
The difference between hyper off-the-cuff Cybershell and chill scripted Cybershell is quite interesting
Doing my civic duty and saying that I support future faxlore episodes, and fax-related content.
Seriously though, you guys make things interesting just by being excited to share them. Like, even if you aren't "the right guys" to explore a topic, you still do it justice. Which sounds cheesy, but I wouldn't watch if I thought this was boring! Keep up the good work lads.
Strong cokehead energy from Cybershell.
Gotta get the RS folks on here, especially about the coveted FM synthesis video.
Growing up we had a fax bc my mom needed it for work. I remember her yelling across the house not to pick up the phone, otherwise the fax wouldn’t come through and you’d hear that horrible banshee shriek
Good to see y’all return!
Cybershell is the first person in my life I've ever forced myself to listen at 0.75x. That guy thinks and speaks at sonic speed levels.
i remember wayneradiotv had a twitch stream where he had a fax machine hooked up and people sent in images to print off and be shown
Hell yeah I'd love a series of videos about this. "Netlore Faxplains"
This reminds me a lot of the "retro encabulator" and "turbo encabulator" in jokes that goes back to the 50's as well started by mechanical engineers