Why Do People Still Use Fax Machines?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2018-05-06
·
936 words · ~4 min read
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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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