Courthouse Square in Hill Valley had mailboxes converted to Pac-Fax boxes and Marty’s future home in Hilldale is filled with fax machines.  There’s at least one in the kitchen, two in the den (right next to each other), and one in the bathroom where Jennifer was hiding.

Fax machines seemed like cutting edge technology in the late 1980s.  You could use phone lines to send pictures!  AT&T was promising that in the future you could send a fax from the beach.

E-mail soon made faxing obsolete.  Why have a machine plugged into a land-line telephone sitting there waiting to print copies of documents that were sent to you when you could just have someone send you an e-mail instead?

You’ll still find fax machines in many offices, but they’re rarely used.  If your home has a fax machine, it’s likely built into a printer and scanner…and it’s a safe bet you never use it for faxing and probably don’t even have it plugged into a phone line.

Surprisingly, Back to the Future Part II also predicts that all these fax machines will also have the same crappy dot-matrix printer quality that we were used to back in the 1980s.  They really got it wrong with this prediction!

Prediction Accuracy: Failed