Goodbye to the Fax machine.

[paulsherwin]

Latency in a VoIP circuit did used to be a problem, but is much lower than it used to be with modern fibre connections and full TCP/IP infrastructure. I'd be very surprised if two fax machines couldn't sync over a VoIP circuit generally.

There was plenty of latency in the chaotic international POTS system 40 years ago and fax machines still managed to work.

[Dave Moll]

If I can find someone on CNet (which uses VoIP) with a fax machine, I'll give fax communication a try.

[bluepilot]

Originally Posted by paulsherwin

I'd be very surprised if two fax machines couldn't sync over a VoIP circuit generally.

My fax machine stopped working when our phone went VoIP. Sometimes it would start to transmit a fax and then hang half way through. I didn't find out why. I just assumed that the compression algorithms which were acceptable for voice signals were compressing too much out of the fax signal. Nowadays I just scan documents and e-mail them.

[agardiner]

Part of the problem with VOIP, is that the audio is compressed, which distorts the analogue signal that a fax machine sends.

[Station X]

My solicitors still have a fax machine. I believe it's quite common for legal firms to have them.

[Roger Ramjet]

Originally Posted by McMurdo

I wonder by extrapolation of the IP system that they will also end leased lines? Only a few years ago when working at water authority depots, leased lines were the thing for industrial SCADA when remote outstations went 'unmanned'. They allowed remote equipment to talk via RS485 or modem without worrying about expensive, older equipment having to use the internet.

Leased lines aka Private Wires were heavily relied upon for burglar & fire alarm remote signalling. Then in the 80's, BT's in house product RedCARE, rendered them obsolete overnight. Ironically RedCARE is now obsolescent due to the impending copper switch off.

Rog

[stevehertz]

Goodbye and good riddance. Apparently the Japanese used them for a lot longer as they wanted to see a signed signature at the bottom of the paper. Go figure..

Otherwise I remember the Telex machine that we had at Thorn, similar kind of end result (immediate transference of information - words only though) but the info was typed in by an 'operator' not a document scanner/copier. I think we got our first fax machine (one for the whole company) in around 1984.

[G6Tanuki]

I can remember there were 'infrastructure' problems with Faxes even back in the early-90s.

In many areas there were insufficient copper pairs in the phone network to support the 'second line' that lots of people/small-businesses were now needing with the coming of the Internet. The BT solution to this was a "DACS" - which took the analog signal from two phone-sockets and digitally multiplexed it onto the existing single copper-pair back to the exchange. The DACS would either be installed next to where the copper pair entered the premises, or sometimes on the pole outside.

Problem was, the digitisation inn the DACS was designed for speech and didn't play at all well with what amounted to frequency-shift-keying of a sinewave, so Faxes and dialup-modems often struggled to work on a DACSed circuit.

[There was another issue wirh DACS: the A.D and D.A converters needed power. In a domestic situation this could be provided from the mains but the pole-mounted version contained a small NiCd batttery that was charged by current from the exchange. With the coming of the likes of BT 'surftime' for dialup, plenty of people would be online in the evenings for many hours - during which time the battery was being discharged. Eventually, the thing stopped working and you lost your phone connection until it had a chance to recharge]

[GMB]

I think I heard that FAX had some legal status and that is why solicitors and some others use it. Not sure what will replace that aspect.

[Heatercathodeshort]

It was very useful but like everything it slowly became abused. I used to open the shop and find almost a whole roll of expensive fax paper curled up on the floor. All SPAM!
OK you could turn it off overnight but that prevented incoming messages from spares suppliers etc. They were also very expensive if you wanted a decent one. RIP fax machine but I certainly won't miss them. John.

[McMurdo]

Oh I'd forgotten about fax spam. Very annoying especially as it cost money to receive. The thermal roll paper wasn't too dear but when I went over to A4 laser it worked out at around 50p a fax sheet, with some spam adverts coming in 3 sheets at a time. And if you tried to interrupt a fax because you recognised the phone number as spam then it just hung up and sent it again 5 minutes later...ad nauseum until it printed out.

At least email spam doesn't cost anything to receive although it's even more prevalent.

[electronicskip]

Just for the Fax AND Amstrad haters.... my fax machine is an Amstrad one that still worked perfectly 4 years ago when i last used it !!

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by emeritus

I believe that Fax was/is popular in Japan because of the difficulty of typing anything in Japanese characters on account of their vast number- it used to be much quicker to write messages etc. by hand than typing, but I don't know what the present situation is.

That's what I heard, and faxes managed to get a much bigger domestic market, while in the western world they we mostly sold to businesses.

It was quite a long time before computers & phones could handle the amount of characters used in Japanese writing.

As Steve mentioned, the Japanese like a signature on official documents, which also explains their continued popularity.

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by McMurdo

Oh I'd forgotten about fax spam. Very annoying especially as it cost money to receive. The thermal roll paper wasn't too dear but when I went over to A4 laser it worked out at around 50p a fax sheet, with some spam adverts coming in 3 sheets at a time. And if you tried to interrupt a fax because you recognised the phone number as spam then it just hung up and sent it again 5 minutes later...ad nauseum until it printed out.

At least email spam doesn't cost anything to receive although it's even more prevalent.

When I worked in a solicitors 20 years ago the company used to receive a lot of spam faxes.

[duncanlowe]

In the loft I'm sure I have a fax machine, that works (worked) with a connection via an ETACS mobile phone. Haven't had a fax machine for a few years since a multifunction device died and it's replacment didn't have the facility.

Used to quite often get FAX enquiries for aircraft spare parts from a company close by, when people misdialled. First couple of times I forwarded them on, but the correct recipient never acknowledged.

Did recently have trouble with a spam fax. Problem was we no longer had a machine so it kept ringing back. Ended up unplugging the phones and then fairly swiftly setting up a call screening service. We think it was a malicious act by one of those scam call centres that ring up and pretend to be Microsoft who were not happy when I told them where to go (after wasting their time for 15 minutes).

[G6Tanuki]

I remember the days of spam faxes; by the mid-90s we'd replaced our physical fax-machines with fax-servers [basically a normal PC modem-card in a PC running under Windows-NT and some bit of Microsoft software] so they didn't waste any paper. Incoming faxes were rendered as a PDF. It did need someone to look at incoming faxes on the server though, and decide whether to delete it or forward it as an attachment to a real person in your company.



The fax-servers also sent faxes: you composed an 'email' in the usual way but addressed to telephone-number@faxserver.address and it went on its way...

One pareticularly annoying fax-spanner went away after we used a little bit of simple software on the server to generate a sliding "barber's pole" of repeated lines of text and sent a few dozen pages of that back to them each time they sent us a spam-fax.

In a way though I will miss faxes. During an 1980s postal-strike I imported a container-load of [non-BABT-approved] faxes from Korea, and leased them out to desperate local businesses. Nicely profitable, covered the purchase-cost of the machines in about 9 months, many businesses continued the initial year's lease-contract. profit all the way after that! I sold the client-list to a friend who sold fax/photocopier/computer-consumables!....

[TonyDuell]

Since this is a vintage forum...

I have a mid-70s Rank Xerox Telecopier in my collection. This is an analogue fax machine that sends/recieves one page at a tiem. You wrap a page of the original round the drum in the transmitting machine, a sheet of special electrosensitive paper round the drum in the recieving machine, and wait a few minutes for the carriage to traverse the drum, scanning or printing as appropriate. Probably spam-proof, and may even work on a VoIP line...

Yes, I do have a couple of boxes of the special paper. And the service manual and circuit diagrams.

[G6Tanuki]

Your Xerox Telecopier sounds a bit like a descendent of the "MuFax" machines I used when in the Territorial Army in the 70s to send weather data and maps over a HF radio link, and to receive weather forecast data from the Met Office broadcasts around 4.7MHz.

The paper used for the receiver was called Teledeltos.

[bluepilot]

Originally Posted by duncanlowe

Problem was we no longer had a machine so it kept ringing back.

Yes, that was another use for fax machines - annoying cold callers. Set the machine up so it tries to send a fax to their voice number and it calls them every five minutes. I used to work for an international company where we were quite well paid and a lot of people thought they could sell us amazing investment opportunities. One particularly persistent one got the fax treatment. We had two fax machines on every floor and ten floors .....

[TonyDuell]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

Your Xerox Telecopier sounds a bit like a descendent of the "MuFax" machines I used when in the Territorial Army in the 70s to send weather data and maps over a HF radio link, and to receive weather forecast data from the Met Office broadcasts around 4.7MHz.

The paper used for the receiver was called Teledeltos.

The paper for mine just says 'Xerox Telecopier Paper' on the box.

I assume MuFax came from Muirhead. I also have a valved Muirhead 'Picture Transmitter'. This thing has a 931A photomultiplier in the carriage which is tracked along the drum, and seems to use a tuning fork oscillator as the master frequency reference. Alas I've never managed to find a manual or circuit diagram for it.