have you ever had this happen to you you're sitting there minding your own
business and you go what's that strange ticking noise oh my
goodness it's a bomb so you call your friend who happens to
be an expert in ordnance disposal for some reason and you scream into the
phone quick a bomb was planted by canadian separatists over the rising
cost of maple syrup how do i defuse it
your buddy tries to take a picture of page 62 of his junior bomb defusal
guidebook with his smartphone but hold on
there's a problem the year is 1970 and
his phone vanishes in a puff of logic
what now luckily your friend has the presence of
mind to dash over to his minolta facts 1114 and jam the instructions in a few
minutes later you've defused the bomb and canada is once again safe from the
scourge of syrup obsessed extremists thanks to the power of everyone's
favorite office companion the fax machine
but as much as we all love them very few people know that fax machines have
actually been around since the 19th century
this was truly a piece of technology that was way ahead of its time
especially considering that the next widespread way to send scanned documents
electronically email wouldn't come along until nearly
100 years after the first device that
could send 2d scans over phone lines which was invented in the 1880s
but how was the underlying technology for fax machines developed so long
before the internet age well a big part of this is the fax
machine's inherent simplicity although faxes generally do use a charge-coupled
device or ccd to read patterns on a piece of paper like a modern scanner
which is a process you can learn more about here your typical fax operates in an even
more straightforward manner fax machines actually see
each piece of paper as a large grid of squares and as they scan the document
they determine whether each square is black or white
they do this one line at a time converting each line into tones
corresponding to black and white spots then they send these down the phone line
to a receiving fax machine which uses its integrated dot matrix inkjet or
laser printer to spit out the image so if all of this sounds a bit crude
well that's because it is well then
why do people even still use these things
well there is still some appeal to the
one-step approach of putting a hard copy into a box and then having another hard
copy get spit out of a box on the other end
without having to download and rotate and resize and print
attachments or whatever the case may be and this is especially true for
organizations that often need to send and receive physical documents such as
law firms or medical offices that also
need to have physical copies on hand for legal reasons and since fax machines can
completely bypass the internet they can be seen as a more secure alternative
that's less prone to hacking in fact some hollywood businesses started using
fax machines again after the infamous
sony hack back in 2014 but this simple
approach does have some drawbacks for starters it's limited by how quickly
data can be sent down the part of the phone wire that carries voice signals
so instead of modern multi-megabit
speeds fax is limited to what you'd see with an old dial-up modem or even slower
which might not seem like a huge issue if you're trying to send a few pages but
even in that case the black and white scanning combined with low resolution
means that fax machines are notoriously bad at transmitting detailed images
fax machines can't send shades of gray
and typically have resolutions that max out at below 400 dots per inch way lower
than what many modern flatbed scanners can do
but while these disadvantages may make
facts feel like a relic today it still has its place in the modern world plain
old phone lines tend to be more reliable than internet connections so fax
machines are a pretty good backup if your wi-fi is on the fritz and you
really need to send something just make sure that you can trust whoever's on the
other end speaking of tools that are great for
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so head over to freshbooks.com techquickie we've got that linked in the
video description and enter techwiki to try freshbooks for
free so thanks for watching guys like dislike leave a comment let check out our other
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