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| Sending Faxes without a land line in late 2018??............. |
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| Rick Law:
This is actually a good reminder to us technologist that technology isn't everything. [Yeah, I researched these back then. I had to explain why EDI was worth doing...] There was a time (around late 1980's to 1990) when fax was everywhere, yet official documents (such as purchase orders, letter of intend...) were send via telex. The world has yet to catch up operationally -- specifically, legal standing of said documents. Telex has been around for decades and by then, the legal requirements were well developed thus better supported by legal codes. Both national and (some) international laws made telex equal to that of a signed letter. So, (depending on where you are) if you get a fax for an order of 100,000 units and the guy backed out of the deal, you have no protection whereas, if you get the same order via telex, you have the legal equivalence of a signed purchase order and can sue the guy for default. EDI started around just after WW II but not as widely used as telex. By 1990, EDI (x12) caught up with telex and then some. EDI gained legal standing with EDI Service Providers being a 3rd party proof. You send an order via EDI, your EDI Service Provider has "data retain rules" and such data can show you did received said document as you claimed. The sender's EDI provider also has collaborating data. So it became easier to deal with legally. Around mid/late 1990, (I think Singapore was first, then Hong Kong and then the rest of the Asean ports) you could do port of entry custom via EDI custom declaration so processing begins before your ship even docked. Email was popular then, but back then if you send Singapore Port of Entry an email of your Bill of Lading and expect them to process your cargo for entry, it would of course go no where. Even today, with all the email, fax, whatever - By law, I have to bring a hard copy for some prescriptions before a pharmacy can fill it where as some prescriptions can legally be handled by fax alone. (That hard-copy required prescription was for some post-operation heavy duty pain killer which contains Opioids). Even my veterinarian(cat doctor) knows email sender id can be faked. So my veterinarian takes (with caller ID) fax prescriptions from my other veterinarian (eye-specialist) but not prescriptions via email. (Yeah, I have my local vet fill the eye-specialist prescription to save the long drive to the specialist.) |
| vk6zgo:
Back in the day, Management decided it would be a wonderful thing if manned TV & Radio Broadcast sites sent a daily report to the appropriate State Headquarters. To this end, we were supplied with Telex machines & a tape reperforator. After a while, we discovered that, using the "reperf" we could make up template tapes with the repeating stuff, run them, stopping & adding the appropriate stuff for that day's report, as needed to produce a new tape for that day. We got pretty slick with this & the Telex system was fast & reliable, very rarely needing a 'resend". Management then fell in love with Faxes, & we had to use them instead. This entailed, either using an old "clickety clack" typewriter, or writing the report by hand. The real trouble started when we tried to send the Fax. It would almost always fail on the first try, sometimes on every try. Compared to the almost trouble free Telex, it was a nightmare. |
| Smokey:
Welcome from 2020, all you fax users! I need to relocate a physical fax machine to a new office that has no POTS wiring, and they really don't want to have to pull any. It looks like T.38 and an ATA is the way to go. Anyone have a recommendation for an inexpensive provider with good T.38 support? |
| Cyberdragon:
--- Quote from: GlennSprigg on December 25, 2019, 02:00:11 pm ---Re: 'Linotype' machines, for the young or uninitiated... It was a huge mechanical machine, like this... where you typed what's going on the newspaper, on the keyboard labeled '1'. As you typed each line, it would spit out molded lead bars into a stack, that had the text reversed, as in the following image. (Still hot to touch for a while!!)... When you had a whole page full, they were set up in a large tray, and a 100 ton press would imprint a physical copy into a thick sheet (like very dense cardboard), called 'ElephantHide'. In another machine, this was bent into a half circle, and a new mold made with a mixture of lead, tin & antimony. (Limited expansion/contraction when hot/cold). 2 of these would make a complete drum shaped circle, to print the pages on rollers. :phew: Now it's all computers, and special photo lithography, but still used not too long ago!!! --- End quote --- There's one of those operating at the Baltimore Museum of Industry, they would give away free casts of whatever you wanted and even had a bucket of worn out molds they would give away like Halloween candy (all way before Corona of course). |
| newbrain:
--- Quote from: Smokey on October 23, 2018, 09:15:37 pm ---It strikes me that an android app should exist that would just generate the tones for a fax and dump that over whatever the voice connection happens to be, but I couldn't find anything like that. --- End quote --- Having worked with the network implementation of fax over mobile networks, I can tell you this is not how it worked or how it can work. The codecs used for voice are so different from what is needed for fax that it would be a pointless and frustrating experiment (the same goes even for simpler stuff, such as DTMF!). What happened for fax (over GSM at least - I'm not even sure it's still supported nowadays!) is that the UE (the phone) would send digital data through the network, and suitable IWUs (interworking units) would generate the fax tones at the border between the mobile network and the fixed one (where voice was sent uncompressed). It was a nightmare of a system for a number of different reasons, e.g., (IIRC): some timeouts in the fax protocols could be shorter than the latency through the network... EtA: Crap, I just noticed it's an old post! Oh well... |
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