Cast your mind back 20 years — 1988, Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a place on earth” was at the top of the Top 40 and Trevor Manual was in jail. It was a long time ago!

It was also the year that the world was introduced to the fax machine. And for the next 20 years nothing changed. You put a piece of paper in one side and somewhere else another piece of paper magically appeared.

About 19 years ago that technology became redundant but apparently the world was just so impressed by the magical pretty picture machine that nobody thought to suggest we stop using it.

Frogfoot doesn’t like faxes but unfortunately they are still required in order for us to receive pretty pictures with peoples signatures on them. A while back we decided to digitise all our incoming faxes. The purpose of this was twofold. Firstly to save paper which is good for the environment and secondly, to make sure that we never lose any faxes.

Doing this is very easy with a little Linux and a recycled Microcom Deskporte 28.8 modem (circa 1995). We use Open Source software called Hylafax to receive and store the faxes and I wrote a little application that lets our receptionist “file” our faxes into virtual in-trays. This gives any frog web based access to the entire history of our faxes.

We also recently did some cool stuff with automatically filling in our signup forms and giving them to you as pre-populated PDFs. This means that you don’t need to “Fill in the form”, but rather just print it out, sign it and fax or email it back to us. We like making your lives and our lives easier so that we can get back to the hard work of being awesome.