I used to work for a company that had a contract with TI that allowed us to resell the Silent 700 terminal (and consumables). We didn't sell many terminals, but we had to keep at least one box of the official TI thermal paper in stock (to be able to supply our remote sites, where each terminal needed at least 1 spare roll of paper on hand). That contract was the best way for us to keep enough paper reliably in stock.
Everyone was using thermal paper fax machines at the time.
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We tried the TI paper in our fax machine once, when we ran out of thermal fax paper. It was the same physical size and it worked OK, but the print quality wasn't as good: legible in good light, but it looked faded. Probably wouldn't scan well.
This was long before Internet fax or plain paper fax. Fax modems were still new.
One Friday afternoon, another company in our building asked us for a roll of fax paper. They had ran out, and they had a big contract that was due to be sent to them.
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We handed them a roll of the TI paper, and explained why it probably wasn't going to give good quality output on their fax machine. They just needed to be able to review the contract as soon as it came in.
We were later informed that it performed as expected.
A week later, we got a phone call: "Hey, do you guys sell Almost Fax Paper?" They namedropped our neighbour. They already knew about the low quality.
They also had a big contract due by fax that day (a Friday), and they bought 2 rolls.
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This happened every 2 or 3 weeks, for about a year, until plain paper fax took over offices. Word of mouth led to a few unfortunate fax machine admins buying inappropriate thermal paper from us whenever their real stuff ran out. Nobody ever reported it working well on an actual fax machine.
And TI didn't notice us ordering more boxes of paper from them.
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