Goodbye to the Fax machine.

[Tim]

[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]

That sounds like WB900( The analogue predecessor of DACS). Remote pole top DACS units are powered from special DACS equipment in the exchange. I spent about 2 years in the early 2000Â’s installing the DACS exchange equipment all over South Severnside.
They use 150 volts, so can give you a surprise if you touch the pair in damp conditions!

[Bazz4CQJ]

Originally Posted by Station X

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

Yes, I'm fairly sure that a fax is legally binding and an email is not. Do GP surgeries regard them in a comparable way? I cannot recall throwing mine away, but I've no idea where it might be.

B

[AC/HL]

It's probably about service level guarantees. It may well be possible to work round some or all future interconnecting difficulties, but they have to assume that many people will just plug and play and complain if it doesn't work as expected. We're used to unthinking backwards compatibility, but that may not always be possible going forward.

[jamesperrett]

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 mention of Mufax brings back memories of scientific cruises on the old RRS Discovery (the sister ship of the Royal Yacht Britannia). We used to use them as part of an acoustic navigation system. I can well remember watching the slanting lines as the pingers on moorings fell down to the bottom or popped back up again after being released. While the seagoing Mufaxes were transistorised by the time I joined, there were still one or two old valve ones in the lab. This system was still in use until the early 1990s.

[McMurdo]

The fax machine was one of Tim Hunkin & Rex Garrod's machines in their original series. They show details of the handshaking around 21min into the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk

[emeritus]

Pictures sent to earth from an early Russian moon landing were transmitted back to earth and received by Jodrell Bank. Someone who had worked in the newspaper industry recognised them as being in an early type of fax format, and not having a fax machine themselves, they borrowed one from the Daily Express, which then had a world scoop by publishing the pictures before the Russians.

https://www.skymania.com/wp/daily-ex...-moon-landing/

[hamid_1]

Originally Posted by AC/HL

It's probably about service level guarantees. It may well be possible to work round some or all future interconnecting difficulties, but they have to assume that many people will just plug and play and complain if it doesn't work as expected. We're used to unthinking backwards compatibility, but that may not always be possible going forward.

That's my understanding of this announcement. Telecoms providers will not have to guarantee that fax machines will work on their networks, but it doesn't mean they definitely won't, or a workaround solution could be developed. A bit like pulse dialling. Some phone lines no longer support rotary dial phones, while some still work. Pulse to tone converters are available for those that need them.

Back in the day, faxes could be sent via analogue mobile phones just like a voice call. Then GSM digital mobile phones replaced the analogue ones. GSM introduced compression. Analogue voice is digitised, compressed, sent over the network and converted back to analogue at the other end. This prevented faxes from being sent as voice calls. You may have noticed, if you've listened to music on hold on a mobile phone, that it doesn't sound very musical. A bit garbled or distorted. That's because the compression was optimised for speech. It also stops faxes getting through.

There was a method for sending faxes over GSM mobile networks. You needed a PC with a GSM fax modem attached, or a phone with one built-in, and a data cable and PC Data Suite software. I actually did this around the year 2000. Faxes were sent / received from the PC in entirely digital form. They travelled digitally over the GSM network, with a flag indicating they were faxes or data, not speech. At the other end, if the destination number was a landline, the mobile network converted the data into analogue audio and passed it onto the landline network where it reached the recipient's fax machine. If the recipient was another GSM mobile, they would also need a PC cable and data suite software to receive it. Or a few mobile phones had a built-in fax decoder. I had the Nokia 9000 Communicator which was like a mobile paperless fax machine. You could also send and receive email and browse the Web, as well as make phone calls, all from a brick-sized device. It seemed amazing at the time. Of course it quickly became outdated.

Now that traditional copper phone lines are switching to VoIP it may not be possible to just plug in a fax machine and expect it to work. A solution like the GSM case above could be implemented, where faxes are sent as uncompressed or lossless data over the internet and converted back to analogue tones at the receiving end. But the extra expense of additional equipment / adaptors could be the final nail in the coffin for the old fax machine.

[stevehertz]

Originally Posted by emeritus

Pictures sent to earth from an early Russian moon landing were transmitted back to earth and received by Jodrell Bank. Someone who had worked in the newspaper industry recognised them as being in an early type of fax format, and not having a fax machine themselves, they borrowed one from the Daily Express, which then had a world scoop by publishing the pictures before the Russians.

https://www.skymania.com/wp/daily-ex...-moon-landing/

Interesting story and link, thanks.

[G6Tanuki]

The history of the Fax is intriguing, in the 1920s there was the Fultograph, which you hooked to the output stage of your radio, it used paper dosed with potassium iodide and starch.

The BBC transmitted some Fultograph pictures as an experiment.

Fultograph was also used in some of the early WWII submarine detection systems on board destroyers.

[PJC58-Hythe]

A slight skew of the topic but I remember testing out the DiskFax when it was first developed, instead of paper you inserted a floppy disk dialled the remote DiskFax and the data on the disk was sent and duplicated on the floppy disk in the receiving machine see http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/15814/DiskFax/ never caught on though!

[Junk Box Nick]

Originally Posted by 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.

I moved to a new job in 1979. The firm had one of these machines, known to all as ‘the Telecopier’ and it lived in the room where I and five others worked. We used to send typewriter-written copy. There were two speeds and sending an A4 could either be done at 3 minutes or 6 minutes. We always used the latter as good clarity on 3 minutes was risky.

The telephone had a sticker on it to remind us to send at the cheaper afternoon rate if at all possible. The phone also doubled as our office phone from the switchboard.

Digressing slightly, in this situation, where only one person could sit at his desk and use the phone (by turning around), six of us sharing it, and it often tied up sending or receiving a sheet, I think back on how concise work briefs to us were, and the instructions to and from outside suppliers the same.

Once handsets appeared on every desk, and telephone time became cheaper, the constant queries, the “I forgot to tell you that...” and the “Can you just...” became the norm.

The first plain paper fax machine of the type more familiar arrived in the office in 1983.

[Graham G3ZVT]

Most of the comments I was going to make, particularly about the viability of using a fax over a DACSed line or over VoIP have been covered by other posters.

Many early Group 3 machines, even the humble BT CF9, had a "Voice contact" button to indicate on the LCD display of the distant machine to "Lift Handset". In this way (with a little discipline from both operators) one could conduct a mixed FAX & voice session without redialling. The feature was removed from most later models.

As for Nick's mention of the Telecopier, Panasonic called some of their models "Telefacsimile Transceivers"

But the best FAX anecdote was when I went to a large Police station to service some.
I noticed a machine that was sending/receiving documents that included mug-shots, the machines had a good "halftone" feature but that wasn't in use, so all the photos came out as silhouettes (yes, I know). I suggested it might be worth the extra page transmission time and use halftome.

[Junk Box Nick]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

Many early Group 3 machines, even the humble BT CF9, had a "Voice contact" button to indicate on the LCD display of the distant machine to "Lift Handset".

I had forgotten one aspect of the Telecopier. We had to phone first and make voice contact. We would say what speed we were using and then one operator would cue the other. On hearing the signal you pushed the button and the drum started spinning.

[TonyDuell]

I'm going to have to get out the circuits book, IIRC that 'connect' button on the telecopier was on the mains side of the power supply and effectively turned the thing on. That would then energise a relay which disconnected the telephone and connected the unit to the line. Alas my machine is missing the line interface module (possibly removed to prevent it being connected to a telephone line back when the GPO had a monopoly on such things)and I've yet to build a replacement.

The 2-speed feature was provided in a somewhat odd way. There are 2 motors. One drives the drum and is contolled by a custom MOS ic (yes, at that time!), the other moves the carriage and is a simple mains synchronous motor. Electrically the speed switch simply reverses that motor. On top of the motor is a complex gearbox, with a gear on a floating bracket. When the motor turns one way, the output spindle turns at the slow speed. When the motor turns the other way the output spindle turns at the fast soeed in the same direction as before.

[Richard_FM]

Originally Posted by emeritus

Pictures sent to earth from an early Russian moon landing were transmitted back to earth and received by Jodrell Bank. Someone who had worked in the newspaper industry recognised them as being in an early type of fax format, and not having a fax machine themselves, they borrowed one from the Daily Express, which then had a world scoop by publishing the pictures before the Russians.

https://www.skymania.com/wp/daily-ex...-moon-landing/

I remember seeing something about this on a documentary a few years ago.

[Chris R]

I seem to recall the Home Office DTels. running tests using MuFax over Fire Brigade VHF radio systems. Maps and plans of destinations could be sent to fire appliances whilst they were on route. I think it all worked well - until....
The system was tried in an Arabian state, where results were disastrous. The heat had dried out the impregnated paper, causing no results.
I don't recall whether the system was ever used widely in the UK.


Chris R

[duncanlowe]

My friend who was in the fire service until the late eighties, certainly talked about such a system being introduced on their appliances. I may have it wrong and it was text only but it certainly sounds like this.

[Slammer]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

The history of the Fax is intriguing, in the 1920s there was the Fultograph, which you hooked to the output stage of your radio, it used paper dosed with potassium iodide and starch.

The BBC transmitted some Fultograph pictures as an experiment.

Fultograph was also used in some of the early WWII submarine detection systems on board destroyers.

Oh the fax isn´t dead, it has just gone underground. Every time you send a print to your laserprinter it gets converted to a 1 bit TIFF in the RIP before being sent to the laser. Mostly it is compressed to CCITT Fax group 3 or 4 which means that your laser printer is actually faxing the data internally.

[emeritus]

Originally Posted by rambo1152

But the best FAX anecdote was when I went to a large Police station to service some.
I noticed a machine that was sending/receiving documents that included mug-shots, the machines had a good "halftone" feature but that wasn't in use, so all the photos came out as silhouettes (yes, I know). I suggested it might be worth the extra page transmission time and use halftome.

Rather more than a decade ago now so I don't remember the details, it was reported that there was a new development in Braille. An MP was keen to see an example, and asked if a sample could be faxed to him.

[Rejectostat]

Originally Posted by 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.

When DCMEs (Digital Circuit Multiplication Equipment) like quadcoders were being introduced on the International Network, clear channels were set aside for fax calls which were then not "chopped up". I think a couple of timeslots of the 30ch PCM system were designated as such. I seem to remember that it relied upon the detection of a 2100Hz tone from the fax machine, which when detected would place that call only on one of the designated "through" channels.