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The Fax is Not Yet Obsolete (theatlantic.com)
Fax, once at the forefront of communications technologies but now in deep decline, has persisted in many industries. From a report: Law-enforcement agencies remain heavily reliant on fax for routine operations, such as bail postings and return of public-records requests. Health care, too, runs largely on fax. Despite attempts to replace it, a mix of regulatory confusion, digital-security concerns, and stubbornness has kept fax machines droning around the world.
An early facsimile message was sent over telegraph lines in London in 1847, based on a design by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. There is some dispute over whether it was the first fax: Competing inventors, including Bain in the United Kingdom and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell across the Atlantic, sought to father facsimile technology, which was a kind of white whale for inventors. Telegraphs already allowed messages to be passed across distances, one letter at a time using Morse code. But the dream of transmitting copies of messages and images instantly over wires was very much alive.
Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
An early facsimile message was sent over telegraph lines in London in 1847, based on a design by the Scottish inventor Alexander Bain. There is some dispute over whether it was the first fax: Competing inventors, including Bain in the United Kingdom and Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell across the Atlantic, sought to father facsimile technology, which was a kind of white whale for inventors. Telegraphs already allowed messages to be passed across distances, one letter at a time using Morse code. But the dream of transmitting copies of messages and images instantly over wires was very much alive.
Writing in 1863, Jules Verne imagined that the Paris of the 1960s would be replete with fax machines, or as he called them, "picture-telegraphs." The technology did eventually lead to a revolution in communication, though it didn't happen until years later. It first became known to many Americans after the 1939 New York World's Fair, where a fax machine transmitted newspaper images from around the world at a rate of 18 minutes per page -- lightning speed for the time. Further reading: 'You Had to Be There': As Technologies Change Ever Faster, the Knowledge of Obsolete Things Becomes Ever Sweeter.
3. Small offices. These offices usually exist because they fill some small special niche market. There must be hundreds or thousands of these (hard to count all of them) just in any small city. 4. Travelling offices. It is much easier to carry a fax and plug into the pay phones at a truck stop to get documents from an office than getting email on your phone and trying to connect wirelessly to a printer. Just an example of something complicated being very simple and effective, even though everyone around rolls their eyes. 5. Fun! As soon as you hear the fax machine pick up with its endearing tone, everyone gathers around to see what will come out. Page after page, what page is next? It's endless fun just wondering what will happen next. Need I give more of the endless set of examples that come to mind?
How many of those doctors, service workers, and others are required by law or regulation to use FAXes?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I developed a hybrid fax system at my voip company using freeswitch.
Basically you can send and receive faxes via e-mail or fax machine, or both.
Using a simple SIP based analog gateway attached to the fax machine we can send and receive faxes via fax machines.
But you can also send and receive faxes by email. To send you send it to (10-digit-number)@fax.myvoipcompanyname.com and it sends it.
We use a simple authentication list to match outbound faxes to customers by their sending email address, that we verify with SPF to ensure its coming from a legit source and not being spoofed.
Law offices love it because we can have inbound faxes sent to a special email account for archival & backup purposes, but also print off at the fax machine for the receptionist to grab. Most opt to receive strictly via email, but some insist they need it printed off automatically, too.
Lots of flexibility and its all basically gravy for us on top of their phone system. I had one lawyer switch to us because of our "state of the art" fax system.
Protection safeguards per the HIPAA laws vary with the method of data transmission. FAXes are assumed to be confidential as long as you know the number you're dialing is correct; e-mail and other digital means require you to validate most of your entire IT chain, and probably to encrypt the e-mail as well.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This.
My broker (stock, not pawn) e-mails me PDFs of forms for signature. Most of the time, I sign it and scan/e-mail the signed copy back. On rare occasions, they want a wet-signed copy. Signed with blue ink, so it's evident that it's a real signature instead of Photoshopped. Those have to go back via snail-mail.
Have gnu, will travel.
When your doctor sends you to get blood drawn, those results come back to him as a fax. They are also sent via electronic data, but a shocking number of medical facilities still do everything by fax, and not because of anything having to do with the government.
And that test results page is packed with medically needed information that arrives as a goddamned image, as though it were a wedding picture. Someone in the doctor’s office has to sit down and transcribe that information into storable form. You better hope that person doesn’t miss a digit or transpose two fields.