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have you ever had this happen to you you're sitting there minding your own

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business and you go what's that strange ticking noise oh my

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goodness it's a bomb so you call your friend who happens to

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be an expert in ordnance disposal for some reason and you scream into the

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phone quick a bomb was planted by canadian separatists over the rising

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cost of maple syrup how do i defuse it

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your buddy tries to take a picture of page 62 of his junior bomb defusal

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guidebook with his smartphone but hold on

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there's a problem the year is 1970 and

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his phone vanishes in a puff of logic

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what now luckily your friend has the presence of

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mind to dash over to his minolta facts 1114 and jam the instructions in a few

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minutes later you've defused the bomb and canada is once again safe from the

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scourge of syrup obsessed extremists thanks to the power of everyone's

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favorite office companion the fax machine

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but as much as we all love them very few people know that fax machines have

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actually been around since the 19th century

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this was truly a piece of technology that was way ahead of its time

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especially considering that the next widespread way to send scanned documents

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electronically email wouldn't come along until nearly

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100 years after the first device that

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could send 2d scans over phone lines which was invented in the 1880s

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but how was the underlying technology for fax machines developed so long

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before the internet age well a big part of this is the fax

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machine's inherent simplicity although faxes generally do use a charge-coupled

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device or ccd to read patterns on a piece of paper like a modern scanner

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which is a process you can learn more about here your typical fax operates in an even

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more straightforward manner fax machines actually see

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each piece of paper as a large grid of squares and as they scan the document

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they determine whether each square is black or white

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they do this one line at a time converting each line into tones

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corresponding to black and white spots then they send these down the phone line

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to a receiving fax machine which uses its integrated dot matrix inkjet or

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laser printer to spit out the image so if all of this sounds a bit crude

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well that's because it is well then

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why do people even still use these things

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well there is still some appeal to the

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one-step approach of putting a hard copy into a box and then having another hard

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copy get spit out of a box on the other end

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without having to download and rotate and resize and print

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attachments or whatever the case may be and this is especially true for

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organizations that often need to send and receive physical documents such as

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law firms or medical offices that also

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need to have physical copies on hand for legal reasons and since fax machines can

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completely bypass the internet they can be seen as a more secure alternative

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that's less prone to hacking in fact some hollywood businesses started using

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fax machines again after the infamous

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sony hack back in 2014 but this simple

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approach does have some drawbacks for starters it's limited by how quickly

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data can be sent down the part of the phone wire that carries voice signals

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so instead of modern multi-megabit

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speeds fax is limited to what you'd see with an old dial-up modem or even slower

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which might not seem like a huge issue if you're trying to send a few pages but

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even in that case the black and white scanning combined with low resolution

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means that fax machines are notoriously bad at transmitting detailed images

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fax machines can't send shades of gray

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and typically have resolutions that max out at below 400 dots per inch way lower

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than what many modern flatbed scanners can do

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but while these disadvantages may make

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facts feel like a relic today it still has its place in the modern world plain

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old phone lines tend to be more reliable than internet connections so fax

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machines are a pretty good backup if your wi-fi is on the fritz and you

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really need to send something just make sure that you can trust whoever's on the

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other end speaking of tools that are great for

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businesses freshbooks if you're a freelancer or a small

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business owner there has never been

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an easier way to keep track of your expenses i mean

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like paper complicated accounting suites nah forget

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that stuff freshbooks has all the same functionality through the cloud on their

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desktop and even their mobile app and it lets you track your expenses log your

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hours and send professional looking invoices in just a few seconds and the

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best part is that freshbooks knows what's important to you and they're all

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about helping you get paid faster too so

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you can send that invoice you can see when the client has seen it you can

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accept the payment on your terms whether you want to take a deposit first or not

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and you can take payments directly through the platform whew

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so head over to freshbooks.com techquickie we've got that linked in the

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video description and enter techwiki to try freshbooks for

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free so thanks for watching guys like dislike leave a comment let check out our other

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channels um subscribe