Category: Fax

As you may have noticed on the Internet, you most often see advertising everywhere, even places that first said they wouldn’t ever go that route.

The fact is that advertising is the life blood of a business and without it you’d not make enough money to stay afloat. Well… there are exceptions, of course. A restaurant strategically placed inside a castle that a lot of visitors like to come and see each year is going to have a lot of free advertising just by being there. On the Internet, some websites get a lot of hits because they have a very large number of pages or have a very niche type of subject and people interested in that specific niche will search and automatically find your pages. But most businesses are in need of leads and in most cases this means advertising.

There are many examples of failing technologies, some specifically happened because an electronic facsimile fails.

Here are a few of these big fails due to fax failures.

The picture above shows an Epson PX-8 with the CX-21 used to send text messages over phone lines. The CX-21 is an acoustic coupling device that allowed the PX-8 to communicate with another similar device or a fax machine.

In the following I explain how faxes are transmitted over a phone line.

Data

First the fax machine will transform one line from the document to be sent in 0s (white) and 1s (black). Then it uses a mechanism to transform those 0s and 1s in an analog signal.

In the 21^st century we have incredible improvements over the type of fax machines we have available.

FOIP

The Fax Over IP is probably the newest and certainly the last type of fax machine that we will use. These work over the Internet. You send the fax to a system which converts the document to a Facsimile and sends it to the other side using a completely automated system.

This Nigerian Letter is linked to fax machines, which is why I talked about it here.

What is it?

The Nigerian Letter is a document sent by a scammer to a victim making the victim think that they can get a lot of money for helping in some (usually urgent) matter.

Before Printing

Humans have been writing for about 10,000 years now. At first, it was mainly to record belongings or other similar accounting of things owned and owed.

That’s around 8,000 BC that humans started writing. However, all the writing was done by hand. There was no way to replicate the same writing for sharing large amount of the same book so everyone could have their own copy.