Some ten years ago, a young man met me at Chennai. He was a successful Chartered Accountant from Singapore. He came with a business proposal for establishing a fax transmission facility absolutely without any hassle. My employer requested me to interface with him on the technical matters

The young man told me that a fax from Chennai to Delhi would not go. I agreed. He added that it is so because the lines between the two cities are pretty bad and expensive. I accepted that provisionally. To improve the matters he said, he will send the faxes to Chicago and that, in turn will retransmit the same to Delhi. Thus he will not only send the faxes free but will make the transmissions reliable, faster and without errors. Great it was -- I asked naively -- why should it be Chicago and why not San Francisco? He said it has to be Chicago and that was that

I raised a simpler issue. When I could not send a fax to Delhi, how could I get that sent to Chicago? He said he could explain but I may not be able to understand it, anyway. There was thus no useful purpose served. Because I could not understand that day I lost an excellent opportunity

Much later I came to recognize the scheme of the young man as Fax-mail -- much like its cousins, the e-mail and the v-mail. The physical transmission of the bits were meant to go on the internet via the nodes (and their servers) at Chennai, Chicago, San Francisco and maybe Delhi. The last mile however remained the same. Fax-mail could not do anything to improve the last mile if there was anything wrong

My remark to the young man was still valid. The Fax-mail would make a good network perform better on the delivery parameters (deferred delivery and faster retransmissions). Xeroxing that solution to local environment may not always have to deliver the same end result. Today you do not depend on the Fax-mail. You scan your document. Make the scanned output a payload, say, for your email. The results would be the same. Fax-mail was actually a wayside stop on the evolution of the global digitization

In retrospect this lately discovered characteristic was missed by the young man because he was trained in accountancy and not in the communication technology! He could have at least engaged me as his Consultant. By being rude I missed that opportunity. And that was my loss!