At the time it was exceedingly rare that email was used for anything other than text because the bandwidth just wasn't there. And especially to the masses. Hell, 10 base T, with it's 10 megabits per second, wasn't a thing till 1990 while people were still generally stuck at 9600 baud as the top end for their modems. The idea of having 10 base T speeds to the home wasn't even a pipe dream at that point.

Even email wasn't necessarily universal. You could be on one system, say CompuServe, but you couldn't email anyone on Prodigy or the internet or FIDOnet or any of the other different places people had email. And some were dependent on what computer you had. A fax machine though? Anyone could buy one, plug it in, and et voila, be able to get faxes from anyone else with a fax or fax other people. You could include pictures, something that email did not do at the time. The idea that email would include anything but ASCII was still in its infancy.

And this doesn't even touch on how hard it would be to know all this back in the day if you were not heavily into technology and read many of the monthly technology magazines. We're spoiled by the internet today, and I say this as someone who grew up in the 70s and 80s and is totally spoiled by the internet. It is hard for my kids to conceive of a time where you couldn't just hop on Google and look up everything there is to know about a topic and especially bleeding edge information about it. All that used to be the domain of the respective disciplines's top people or people who bothered to read the latest papers coming out.

To people of Gibson's time, myself included, the idea that fax would rule was not nearly as insane as the idea that people would be able to pull a nigh infinite amount of information from their computers. And doing something like watching a movie through your computer? That would have seemed far more futuristic than he was trying to convey. That was some straight up Star Trek stuff. And remember, he was trying to convey a world that wasn't that far in the future.

I think the biggest problem with these lists is that it lacks the context of the times they were made in. Alien with it's CRTs and big single unit terminal with attached chair to access the ship's AI did not seem out of place at all. The minidisc player in Strange Days? It happened right as we were transitioning to DVDs - when previously discs could only hold albums. It didn't seem far fetched that they'd increase data and decrease size continually. Indeed, these lists seem to require that you not have that context because the moment you do, you realize how silly they are. And when you consider these are movies, that have limited budgets to project the future, these lists really fall apart.