The Bell telephone monopoly was required to subsidize residential lines by charging higher prices for business customers.īroadband internet was still uncommon and dial-up was still spreading fast. Land lines were still almost universal, even though they have always been somewhat expensive.
#WINDOWS FAX AND SCAN ADD SCANNER INSTALL#
I think it’s fine for things like this to be optional - given that fax isn’t widely used in a lot of the world, it seems like a strange thing to install by default.Ī couple decades ago laptops & smartphones were still out of reach for students and most business people didn't need them either, so they were much less popular. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this is a part of why Windows struggles to maintain popularity in the tablet space outside of the Surface line, and the Surfaces aren’t exactly entry-level. It might not be obvious on a typical desktop PC, but on many low-end tablets and laptops, it can eat a large amount of the already-restrictive storage space. On the other hand, all of this weight has to go somewhere and that’s a pretty large part of why even fresh Windows installs have such a significant footprint. In a business setting that is absolutely crucial, particularly given that there are so many companies in the world using software and databases that were written 15-20 years ago. On the one hand, the extreme level of backward compatibility is pretty great - it’s very rare that software stops working just because you upgrade Windows.