You Coulda Just Faxed From Your PC (Since 1995)
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- čas přidán 22. 03. 2021
- Almost every PC you've ever used was capable of sending and receiving faxes, it put the feature right in front of you, and you didn't look at it because fax is the most boring subject on this entire planet.
This video was made at the beginning of February for what was going to be Fax February, but then February was a disaster for me and disrupted my life in many ways, so I've decided it's Fax February indefinitely. I consulted nobody on this and will accept no arguments to the contrary.
A footnote: It seems that fax functionality disappeared between 95 and XP. I didn't realize this while shooting, so that's a misstatement; I checked in 98, ME and 2000 and could not find it. Still, that only covers five out of 25 years, and a lot of people watching this weren't around for any of those OSes.
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The presence of the "Fax" printer in my printer dialog is blowing my mind. I've *never* seen it before yet I know it's always been there. This has to be some kind of SCP that escaped containment, only perceivable by people obsessed with obsolete technology.
I was always wandering, why it was turned on by default. I never questioned it purpose (yeah, it said fax), but... If you have modem, you got email, so, why the hell it is needed in XP era (and also, here modems was quickly becoming obsolete at that time).
@@paveloleynikov4715, Doctors offices and warehousing/shipping offices will still be using them till the sun turns to ash..
@@paveloleynikov4715 AFAIK, It's due to draconian laws. Faxes are considered to be direct copies of the original documents, where as other forms aren't. So, legally speaking, a fax of a contract that you've signed and returned is legally as good as the original, where as scanning it into a PDF and emailing it aren't. Yes, there is no technical difference there, but there is a legal one... even though the reality is the same.
@@paveloleynikov4715 : Maybe 10 years ago, I worked at a place where we faxed our product order to a particular small product provider... which I don't remember the name of. I figure they got a computer in the 80s or 90s, got a fax modem, started using it, and just never bothered moving to the web. For producers with limited possible production volume, and a reasonable choice of "centralized" bulk consumers, faxing may even now be a reasonable way to do business.
@@paveloleynikov4715 yeah the Dial Up modem is Very obsolete
Hope everything's ok over at the Florida branch, that fax seemed urgent.
It was so urgent they did it by hand because they couldn't wait to do it typed
no cover sheet though. That's not how you send TPS reports
the fax button in the printer selection is a more earth shattering realization than when I realized the "save as pdf" button was real too
Save as PDF is the best. It’s what the document gets turned into before going into the printer driver anyway, might as well siphon it off!
@@kaitlyn__L not quite. The printer driver on Windows receives GDI commands just like rendering into a window! However on other systems, and for some printers also on Windows, PostScript is an intermediate step and is natively supported. Which is again similar to but distinct from PDF.
@@SianaGearz PDF is what’s sent to the driver, and older printers all used PostScript. Which is back and forth convertible with PDF, albeit PostScript takes twice the disk space.
I had a fax modem on my Newton back in the 90's. It was magic! Somebody at Microsoft is going to be very excited to see their work covered like this :)
One of my favorite things about running this channel is that people will pop up and go "oh yeah I worked on that 30 years ago and you're the first person to ever mention it" and I am INCREDIBLY satisfied every time it happens. I hope whoever wrote the fax cover sheet editor pops up and goes "we did a three week sprint to get this built and never got any praise for it until now" because I will ask that person for an *interview*
@@CathodeRayDude "because I will ask that person for an interview"
you just got yourself another Patreon.
I work at a store that faxes things for people daily. Since I have access to a fax machine I always fax memes to a friend at another store across town
Sir, you have found the only legitimate use for a fax machine. Bravo.
Some reason, getting faxed a meme seems so nice. Texting memes is okay, but faxing? That's dedication. Even if you work at a fax store.
Bro you should prank people and fax memes to random fax numbers to see I you get a reply
@@Mr.DontKnow I read where somebody got a fax from a toner dealer every few weeks (a letter which used lots of toner) so they dipped a length of tractor-feed page in black paint and made it into a conveyor belt...
This is massive. My union (at a legal services org.) is currently in the process of yelling at management for making us go into the office to send and pick up our faxes. I literally went into the office today to pick up a client's fax. If it is possible to send faxes from our computers at home that would change so much.
Either remote access, or have a PC receive the faxes and upload them in a shared folder/cloud service.
Or starting around ~17:30 he talks about a fax server with shared access
Solidarity mate, union proud union strong.
@@feelingevaporated2912 You indirectly just caused me to learn that Arthur Scargill named his daughter Margaret.
There are web services too that you can use to send/receive faxes.
@@nrdesign1991 you could probably find software that creates a virtual printer and saves what it prints as PDF on a Dropbox folder (without user input), then just tell windows fax to print every incoming fax to that
Uh oh. you broke the "somebody else's problem" field. MS is going to realize the fax is there and rip it out next update.
MS sucks about ripping out shit (my snipping tool!), but I'd be surprised if they remove fax accessibility. That would be giving up one of their last bastions over companies that haven't switched to Macs, yet.
@@endlesswanderer1753 snip and sketch is so much better imo, you can even set the print screen key to open it ready to snip
@@kreuner11 open windows search, type in 'Use the Print Screen key to launch screen snipping' and open the result and toggle the switch
@@endlesswanderer1753 ummm dude, whats happening to snipping tool? I've got that shit open right now, don't tell me its going somewhere
@@randomcow505 they might have changed this, I'm not sure, but I heard they're replacing/removing it in 11.
Not gonna lie, you've got me horrifyingly interested in digging up my old laptop and sending faxes.
Same. I have an old Asus gaming laptop from that era next to me as I was watching this video and it was suddenly calling to me like a mermaid luring an unsuspecting sailor into the waters.
"Send a fax on meeeee"
You don't even need your old laptop that the great thing, a 10$ rj-11 jack to USB adapter will make it work fine
"Mailmerge is an expensive piece of software"
He has yet to discover that Word has it built-in.
Word is indeed expensive.
@@CharlesFigueroaJr 365 is 10$ a month
@@jaykoerner I, for one, absolutely refuse to pay a subscription for a piece of software that has a major overhaul about once every 3-5 years.
@@CharlesFigueroaJr But is it expensive..... No
@@jaykoerner It is also crap and propietary, so there's that
Fun fact: Even under windows 10 you can still use the "Old" picture viewer instead of the new one. It is still there, you just need to change some settings in the registry.
@@craigjensen6853 To be fair, the old photo viewer is showing it's age. It doesn't play animated images at all (unless thats another registry value I am unaware of?) it doesn't support newer image formats like WebP, and every now and again gives errors to images that every other program can open perfectly fine.
I think it also has caching issues with large (hundreds of gigabytes) folders? I don't know the exact root cause but Ive seen it take a extraordinary time to open and take excessive amounts of memory opening a 640x480 jpg, even though its loading from an SSD.
If you like the old Photoviewer, I'd recommend ImageGlass. Some quick changes in the settings, and you can get the program to look and behave like Photoviewer with a modern coat of paint, and support for those modern formats. ( Super handy when dealing with seniors who have a hard time with programs changing. - and I don't blame em, I hate the "Photos" app on Win10 )
That said... I don't think it supports the Fax stuff?
every time i try to open a picture it opens in paint
@@craigjensen6853 if by "getting there with the control panel" you mean "still have tons of settings which are now virtually inaccessible because you have to manually go to the specific control panel applet you need because everything else takes you to the Settings app instead"...
@@-DeScruff they could've fixed any or all of that in the old photo viewer instead of making a crappy new one that's half as useable.
@@app0the You're saying 'never changed since win3.11' like it's a good thing.
As someone who worked in desktop IT and network administration during Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 days for a public school district I can confirm that faxing has been a regular computer feature since literally before Windows existed. It’s as old as dirt and there have been mail merge features in DOS software on 5.25” floppies and on Novell Netware servers since dinosaurs still roamed the earth. Ancient VAX mainframes connected throughout Washington state for the schooling system could fax in bulk too, and auto-generate cover letters. Schools make strong use of central printers, central faxes, modem banks, phone call-out banks for voice messages, etc. You need stuff like that to call substitute teachers, announce truancy, announce school closures, etc. Public schools are also major bureaucracies, so faxes (physical and virtual) are very common. At a district with 12 sites and around 500 staff and 2,500 computers it’s just big enough to need lots of automation systems, but not big enough to have lots of money, so there’s extensive use of “free” and cheap solutions relating to fax et al.
Ahhh. Novell Netware. I remember Novell Netware :D
The movie "Where the buffalo roam" has the best scenes portraying a Bill Murray-fied "Hunter S. Thompson" constantly having to send his column/article/writing to Rolling Stone.
But in all seriousness, Fax is still big in asia. The character set lends to it.
And with you on all the rest as I stare 50 dead in the eyes.
I first learned about Networking on Novell Netware 3.1 way back in 1997. I haven’t heard that name in years.
Do they really had modem banks on site? That is pretty expensive for school. Especially for digital lines. I would imagine some service from telco company like a fax multiplication service or colocated remote terminal server sending predefined messages.
@@rybaluc no modem banks. A Windows NT Server with 4x modem cards installed (think PCI/ISA cards) was the only “modem bank.” It was not expensive.
Fax don't care about your feelings, fax only care about phoneline.
had to edit, lost the little icon :(
If it uses a phoneline.
I remember My self taught Mother setting up and sending a fax off our gateway around the year 1999, she'd learn the newest tech just to teach her Sons.
Faxes are so much better than the telephone. Why do people always want to talk?
Also i think the reason that they "suck" is that they are related to scanners and printers, which are all really annoying to work with.
Culture. My culture is not that chatty - historically we had limited access to phones and 12km might be long distance call so we keept the talk brief.
From my experience most phone chatty are people from US,Italy,Spain and Russia.
I had been supporting fax machines well in to 2020 and a simpler more cost effective way was right under my nose all along?
WINDOWS FAX SERVER!? MULTIPLE USERS!? Bloody hell. I could have saved hundreds of pounds if I'd just purchased a bloody USB Fax modem.
Love the content. This is my kind of video.
I remember back in the early 2000's, looking after an NT4.0 network, and the MD always had to have peeps send faxes. I ended up setting up a fax server on the network, so people could send them straight from the computer. Not everyone used it though, they distrusted it more than a physical fax machine, so we still had to keep both options.
Yup I'm one of the people who has seen the word "Fax" in every version of Windows I've used since 98 and the word immediately leaving my brain after reading it each time I saw it
'can you imagine sending a fax... from the beach?' is one of the longest running jokes with my partner.
@Lassi Kinnunen 81 It was integral part of gsm. However you needed gsm digital modem card (early 90s) or mobile phone with built in stuff - late 90s.
Also if opposite end was just analog fax this have to go through your mobile operator modem banks as gsm fax transfers were fully digital and needs to be converted.
Love your channel 🕺❤️
Can your synths make fax machine noises xD I guess it’s just a sine wave? lol.
Well fancy seeing you here!! Haha
What is up doctor!
@@fkthewhat Sine of the times.
I enjoy this guy’s videos. I always learn something.
I've watched ALOT of vintage and nostalgia tech channels for years and never as satisfied with the coverage and research given to a subject as I am with this channel! Thanks CRD!
Honestly, I think fax has exited enough peoples' lives long enough ago that it's become interesting again. Sometime within the last 10 years, fax has turned from this nuisance that I hoped to never need into an arcane low-tech curiosity. I'd be happy to see more fax videos!
Not true at all. I work with a lot of government agencies and it was just 2020 when I had to fax documents. It wasn't a choice. If I wanted their business I had to fax.
The end bit about hating fax so much that you don't even see it is accurate as hell. I print a shitton daily and never once have I registered the fax option.
HELL YEAH! Lived in Japan in the late 90s and I remember my host family having a FAX machine in their living room, and that shit got MAD action ALL the time
Guess I’m setting up a windows fax server. I’m a sysadmin who’s been paying e-fax companies for years. Now how to avoid telling my boss this has been available since before I was born 🤔
Tell them that you're switching services. The new services is you. You now get paid the amount you were paying for the old service.
@@Crlarl pro move
"Look what Microsoft added in the most recent update!"
You still have to pay for a landline.
And funkiest thing with fax machines was remember how to use damn thing. Sending aside (which is straitforward) remembering how to set it to receive without manual was frustrating at least.
It's pretty rare to have to fax something, and when I do it's always something with a signature (since the legal industry is the last bastion of the fax), so you need a scanner. And at that point you might as well use a printer/scanner/fax combo.
Ever time I need to send something digital with a signature, I just use my phone to draw my signature in a random drawing app and paste the resulting image into the signature line of the document, still my physical signature and I still don't have to go find a pen and or physically go somewhere to sign a document
macos preview app allows you to import your signature as a vector drawing from the webcam by holding a signed paper against the camera, and then just paste it into the document
i guess something like that exists for windows as well
Here in Germany I see a lot of people letting their router handle fax, I'm doing it myself this way too. If I receive a fax, the router converts it and sends it as an email with an image attached. I can even reply to that mail and my router sends it back as a fax. Tbh, last time I used it was 2016ish, when me and a friend tested it out lol
That’s pretty wild. I never experienced that in the UK with ADSL. I know Germany went ISDN early on, do you think that has something to do with it? Even if you don’t use ISDN on your router, maybe that influenced things to use software fax conversion sooner or something? IDK lol
@@kaitlyn__LYea ISDN became available around 1994/5 and you were the king if you had it, with line doubling you had roughly 2x the speed of a regular 56k modem. Wild times 😄
As for the routers handling fax, it can really depend on the country. I have some friends in Austria and they say, their provider doesn't allow them to change any settings in the router. In some cases they can't even access the web interface at all. This would not be possible in Germany because here is a law that forbids providers to force you a specific router model.
@@Raveheart In CZ it is prohibited as well but operators work around it or prohibit to offer you service. So this is not really effective law.
I think we should call it an fMail :p
Thanks for AVM modems guys :D
OHHHH. My mom had that Fax machine. She always yelled at me cause I would fiddle with that dial all the time.
I seriously can't afford supporting you on Patreon right now, but after watching a handful of your videos I was hooked. You think almost exactly like me and goofed around with the really obscure crap MS included with their operating systems and fiddling with qbasic, I realized that "Holy crap, I'm not the only one", I was mesmerized. After a few more, noticing your LGBT and BLM stuff, and now hearing "my boyfriend" come of out your own mouth, I realize that you are the person I wish I was. You have my (all but financial because I'm poor) support and I definitely will be sending you $$$ as soon as I can afford it.
Back when I still had a landline, I used my modem for caller ID. I do have to wonder how many people knew that COM port could listen for incoming calls and provide information.
This was delightful, and I'm saying that despite the fact that I run Linux and in this brief moment I can't feel superior to all windows users
I have known about this for a while but I was certain it was removed in Windows 8 as I last remembers seeing it in Windows 7 Surprised Microsoft have kept it around.
Also wish I could say "boyfriend" mid video without hesitating
This is definitely one of those things were, those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter. You be you, and let everyone else figure out their own %#^$.
@adam I also noticed that comment and grinned. Representation matters!!~
Couldn't care less or more for that fact. I enjoy the content, I don't care about peoples personal life, it's their own thing. As long as their happy
@@nickwallette6201 and that's where the bigots' brains go out of their heads and end up in a puddle on the floor. If they want to be prejudicial assholes while not ok they'd be harassed less if they learn to just walk away over something they don't like.
tom scott's nyan fax back in 2012 is the only good application of fax machines I've ever seen
actually i thought the same about fax-modem, until i heard a fax answering a phone call then my brain made the connection that the 'fax-modem' can do fax too !
Are you referring to the AT&T You Will Commercials?
On the other end of the spectrum, someone was adamantly convinced my phone number growing up was a fax machine. We got phone calls that turned into loud digital squawking about a second after we put the handset to our ear all the time for several years.
@@CptJistuce There was a fax detector/ fax - phone switcher box back then which could reroute/silence fax calls. It was a primitive device. Fax calls have initial tone on a specific frequency so it can be detected - it was designed intentionally into a standard. This tone is there before other training communication occurs.
Your content is amazing. I love the depth of your knowledge and your enthusiasm.
Fantastic video, as always! I absolutely love your coverage of these kinds of topics; supremely accessible and informative, and hilarious at the same time.
Faxing always scared me because I never had a setup where I could see both ends of the transmission and figure out the configuration settings to make sure things transmitted properly. And I never had a data-dedicated phone line to mess around with setting up a receiving end. I think I've sent about 3 faxes in my life (always some critically important form, of course) and each time it was terrifying.
Basically every multifunction printer/scanner also has fax functionality, as well!
While I was staying in the psych hospital i had to have the lady at the reception fax medical documents to my insurance. I accidentally gave her their phone number and there was just a very worried "hello? Heeeello?" Coming from inside the fax machine.
I do a lot of work with Amish people, specifically a group that allows faxing but not Internet access/email. I learned alllll about the Windows fax stuff. Unfortunately I fried my modem in a lightning storm so that ended that.
The thing I really wanted and couldn’t seem to find was an audio driver for a voicemodem, so I could run a full call center with one. Apparently you need a PBX or some such thing.
Do it in software with a bunch of cheap extension cards. Asterisk PBX is around since 1999.
Ive never been more inclined to subscribe from such a dull video… you are amazing ❤️
Man your videos are gold. Seems your getting back to form? Thank you for time and quality work. No ads? This is a passion channel and that’s inspiring.
Your enthusiasm in your videos is so much fun. I apparently was in the minority that sent and received faxes from a PC, but still thoroughly enjoyed the way you presented it.
Describing TIF as proto-PDF is actually a really great way to represent the format.
i love how most people ignore the fact something like 90% of office printers have fax capability built in
It tends to be at home the phone is in the hallway, the printer is in the lounge or office, the spagetti as additional phones are added to the jacks and so on just grows, and it needs a power supply.
You excel at bringing attention to extremely peculiar stuff. I literally had never noticed the glimpses of Fax integrated throughout Windows, even tho I knew computers could send faxes. I remember being impressed at faxing software being installed on a G4 iMac ten years ago. Never knew it was so tied to the OS and would still remain to this day!
😂 I used to go on bbs boards looking for random fax numbers, mostly for restaurants and print them out at home. Then my friend's and I would argue about the food. My dad wasn't impressed about all the paper I wasted. Ah to be 13 again.
This is an impeccably crafted video, hands down the most excited I have ever been about faxing.
You are fast becoming one of my favorite channels. I wish you the best of luck!!
A dedicated Fax/Phone Device was a terrible thing... NOW a MFP (Multi Function Printer) that can Print, Scan, Fax. I have had the same MFP for 10 years. It is a Dell 1135n and other than the software needed to Scan to PC (being broken on windows 10) The fax feature is excellent and has not failed to function. Using an Analogue Fax Adapter with Google Voice has served all my fax needs for all this time.
Fax in the 1980s, Great must need feature for business... Fax in the 1990s ehh, maybe less so... Fax since 2001... No email and secure file transfer systems have solved the need for fax. Only reason I have it is well, the government. They are stuck about 25 years behind the rest of us.
Given the ISP etc hacking, Fax seems more secure !
@@highpath4776 Do you think whole fax transmission cannot be dumped and replayed or decoded? I could generate scam fax very easily. Especially from abroad because sometimes caller id is not working.
Do you know how much secure entire path is?
There were/are encrypted fax services or encryption. But usually not for a civil use. Not common amongst public.
@@rybaluc Indeed you can only really go on what is on the fax, but most are between trusted parties, whom have normally spoken on the phone, so the information is confirmatory, or is confirmed in other ways. Our system we used to send out booking forms for telephone line installations, one to our local BT provisioning group and one to the customer.
This channel is pretty much as cool as they come, I've just been marathoning through all this awesome content. Thank you!
The other important thing about cover pages is it helps the recipient separate out individual faxes from the pile sitting in the output tray of the fax machine.
I'm glad I subscribed last week after watching the NES over the air video. This was very informative and entertaining. Love that one of the last lines; "we nerds seen printers and fax and looked right through it... (Guilty as charged :-P)
I remember finding this function in my Windows 3.1 Tandy. It was super helpful to "send" letters to school excusing my "absence" from school. For the "signature" I just used the cursive font. The office ladies bought it each time. Eventually stopped trying to get out of school this way in the 5th grade.
This was awesome, man. I love your videos. Cheers!
I've been trying to do VoIP fax for a while! I've always found fax fascinating (as with..everything else that uses what you might think a single-purpose transport, such as phone lines and radio). Thanks for putting this video together!
VOIP fax can be frustrating. I have an Oomla and never got faxes to transfer over it properly. Even using the special code, slowing the transmission rate and using different devices didn't work. I know there are VOIP services that can do it but be prepared for a struggle.
@@chaos.corner I have it working properly on my PBX, it just seems like nobody's a big enough dork to have made some means of making Windows Fax speak SIP in pure software, without an ATA and a modem like Gravis used in the video. Maybe I'll cobble something terrible together :)
@@maffsie if you do, translate it in Japanese and put it on the play store on Android I'm sure you could make a decent amount of bucks ;)
This man has opened my damn EYES to the world of faxes. As a starting cyber sec guy, im excited to rub this information in any future employers faces like "Oh what's that? You're paying HOW much to have some dopes do the faxing thing you can do for FREE right NOW."
Companies don't pay for the capability, they pay for support to be available.
Fax machines(especially in all in one printers) are also a very interesting attack surface... There was a DEFCON talk called What The Fax where they hacked and entire network by sending a fax.
Love this kind of content. I’m a tech nerd and besides opening the fax client once or twice never gave it anymore thought. Hell, even pointing out the print to fax woke up a part of my brain that has seen it but never paid it any attention.
Wish I knew all this years ago. Email is the go to for everything now.
i love all your videos so much :) thank you for making them !
Honestly I can only imagine how much my company is paying for some e-fax service now that we switched to VOIP about two years ago...but I can guarantee it's a lot.
Even with VOIP, normal faxing is still possible. So you could always ask them to undo that particular switch...
@@slashtiger1 It could be very complex problem - depends on operator support, t.38 support or pcm codecs transmission stability, where it IP enters TDM networks, quality, fax standards you intend to use.
It coukd be still worth of money to pay efax services. Especially for SBS/SOHO.
@@rybaluc I know. One of my ISPs never officially supported facsimile applications because of this, even though they worked just fine on their network. I have been using them on a bit rate of 33.6K, as that was the highest reliable transfer rate was.
With my current subscription, which I took out with a different ISP, I don’t take out any phone service. But I do know that they _do_ officially support facsimile applications. What’s more, they can even support 56K V.90 connections. I have tested this at a friend’s address by dialling in to a service that we can access to this day, Ane we had a reliable connection at 56kbps.
The ISP states they don’t officially support V.92, but I find it quite impressive that they do, in fact, still support V.90.
In fact, they also support HD Voice on landlines, which requires additional frequencies and codecs to work. So although it’s not a given that every VOIP line does, in fact, support anything other than voice, some lines actually do support quite a number of other technologies. The only thing that I haven’t got to work reliably is pulse dialling. But who uses that nowadays…?
Yay, you released the fax video! :D I was hoping you would.
Absolutely love these videos. Keep em coming dude
Loved this video! I remember about 3-4 years ago being shocked when my doctor had to fax details to a specialist as apparently email was ‘too insecure’ haha so dumb.
The output on the PC of that fax looked amazing!
Also I love how Microsoft finally get one thing right but it's something as obscure as sending and receiving faxes that like 99% of people will never even know about. .
A rare one that I actually knew about. I worked in pharmacy for a while and the FAX processing that the vendor software was doing was actually just handed off to the Microsoft program you discussed in this, but the Windows Server 2008 version. You'd occasionally have to open up the queue and see what the hang up was.
Just subscribed. I've been looking around your channel, looks like you have a lot of good stuff !
For those on Windows 11: it's an optional feature you can install through Settings > Apps > Optional Features now.
Your videos (and the comments on them) have an amazing tendency to make me feel VERY OLD.
I remember built-in faxing being a huge selling point in (I think) Windows for Workgroups 3.11, and they were also talking about an amazing feature where if you were sending a fax to another Windows machine, the document would remain an "active document" and could embed media and stuff. i.e. it was basically email, except transmitted over the fax protocol.
I don't know if that particular feature ever made it to market but it was definitely A Thing that a lot of folks were interested in in the early 90s.
I remember trying to deal with online fax things because we haven't had a landline in 20 years.
Getting a land line would probably be less annoying than those
Boy did you get a sub because of this vid! I guess I must have been the only person on the face of this Earth who _hasn't_ been ignoring Windows Fax and Scan all these decades, because I actually used it. In fact, I used the living daylight out of it. I had set it up so it would print incoming faxes straightaway, and so it would send faxes between 8pm and 7am (which were the low rates, back in the day, in The Netherlands). Officially, I wasn't even supposed to _be able_ to make outgoing (fax) calls from where I lived at the time, but I guess I knew the telephone system (PBX) a little too well for their comfort, and figured a way around this restriction that I could engage from the keypad of a phone (and thus from a computer). I eventually found a set of Hayes command strings to make life easier and programmed my modem to execute those at boot and resume normal functionality afterwards. Man, did I send a load of faxes... For a long time, they had been the only way for me to reach people outside of where I lived without having to resort to a communal pay phone.
i thought the fax thing in the printer box required you to have a fax capable printer which my house always had (even though we never used it). this makes a lot more sense.
0:10 darned anti-faxxers 🤣
On a more serious note, video was a fun watch. I never really had to fax anything myself at this point. But it is amazing to see what is hiding in plain sight even today!
Awesome video, I had no idea about this, lol. Also nice mention of the boyfriend too, I didn’t know that and it was a good way to mention it. :)
I love your videos about stuff like this. Its the missing link in computer and technology videos. No one else makes stuff like this
I work at a very small rural auto parts shop in the middle of nowhere, sending a fax is rare but we do it from time to time, so this was genuinely really interesting to learn about. Gonna show my boss and try it tomorrow lol. If I wasn't already subbed, this would've gotten me to do so, thanks for this video.
The worst part of all of this is that quite a lot of the people who could benefit from this aren't knowledgeable about this kind of stuff and are the type of people who train their employees to print out documents and scan them back in to forward them to a new address (my mom was actually trained to do this...)
yeah! yeah!!!!! yeah!!!!!!!!!!!!!
We have a printer/copier/scanner in our office. There are people in our office who print a document out, move it from the output tray to the input, scan it, return to the same computer from which they just printed it, find the resulting PDF, and attach it to an email... (Yes. Really).
@@sevenisloud
I don't even want to know how they take a screenshot.
@@Crlarl I'm a 63 year old man...what is that....how do you do that.
@@dwightpowell6673
A screenshot is an image that shows what a computer had on-screen at a given moment.
Most computers have a built in function to save a screenshot. On Windows, press Win key + Print Screen.
13:30 I imagine that could have been useful for press releases.
This was a great video, thank you! :)
Oddly I seem to be the tech nerd that knew it was there, but never needed to fax anything while I still had a land line. Minute we stopped paying for one and switched to cell only? Bam!
I love your videos. 20 minutes ago I had absolutely no idea that at any point of my life I would be interested in anything about fax machines.
My All-In-One Printer has colour fax (I'm not in Japan) and I was able to send a colour fax over 2000 miles away to another part of Canada. The recipient used software called "Impact Color Fax" by a company called Black Ice to receive it. I've also sent a black and white fax overseas to Germany (slowest mode and no error correction). I have Data-Ident-A-Call (different phone companies have different names) which means I have two numbers sharing the one line. Whenever someone dials my dedicated number it does a special "double ring" which the fax machine knows to auto-answer and then prints it out.
We used HP All-In-Ones at Radioshack for office printing (for signage that needed color printouts, before we got a color LED printer from lexmark - that was a beauty) as well as faxing. Every other store would use the same prescribed model from corporate, so it all worked. The 2 newest incarnations of these machines supported "normal" "fine" and "color fine" modes if memory serves. The color modes scanned at decent res, and sent through effectively a jpeg, which i've just now checked with wikipedia and indeed is part of the standard, t.81.
TIFF lives on as the raw formats for Canon cameras, DNG, science. It's an amazingly deep format.
I could spend hours talking about this format. What's funny is that it's sort of a cousin of the EA IFF format which is used in wav, mp4, mov, aiff, and so on. So imagine my laugh when I realized that canons newer cameras embed Metadata in their CR3 format, which is based on MP4, as a tiff file. It never ends.
Yeah. It seems there are really three container formats. 1) RIFF. 2) MOV. 3) Raw data with a header.
This was way more interesting than I expect and your absolutely right about me overlooking
Second video of yours I've seen today. Wonderful. Thank you. You've gained another subscriber.
Edit: I started watching more and more content. Thank you again.
he speakin fax
Trufax
I always remember, even as young as 7, KNOWING the shiny new $4000 computer my mom "needed for college" could send fax, and getting frustrated that my parents just absolutely refused to believe it was possible.
My dad it made sense, because he was like 53 when we got that first "modern" PC, but my mom was literally going to school for computers, so that was unacceptable.
Im guessing you are too young to remember, but I started my IT career in the mid 90s and was around IT long before that. Individual fax machines were really only present in small businesses or home offices. Even back then, they were some of the most hated machines in the office, as they always had issues with paper roll alignment and/or quality. At that point, if you did any serious amount of faxing, you had a "business" class printer/photocopier with fax built in. Even small businesses were moving to all-in-one printers with faxes built in. No one used Windows' fax software, as when you installed the printer driver and software, that vendor's fax software was installed as well. You would either "print" a document to the fax, which would trigger the software to run so you can enter the fax number and make a cover sheet, or you would take a pre-printed document to the machine itself to scan to a fax. Small fax machines, like the one in your video, would mostly sit around unused in an office mail room or printer area collecting dust.
A great and worthwhile vid! This brings back memories... in the mid-90s as a teenager, when I got my first modem (that was also a FAXmodem), I tried out a printer driver for my Amiga computer that "printed" any page as a FAX out over the phone lines. I bothered my mom at her office all day sending her pointless pictures and printouts over FAX. Well, it was summer vacation; what else was I going to do?
I love all the tech demos you've made.
Me watching this video: woah, this is really cool! Who would have thought fax could work with a PC! You: “then it pulls up windows contact list” Me: WHAT
showing up to say "they were always built like crap". great video.
I faxed regularly all the way until around 2002 for the work I used to do. I had a fax machine, but mostly relied on services like ureach, efax, and jfax to send and recieve most things. Services like that were a big deal in the late 90's/early 2000's. There was also this really odd time where businesses were still figuring out how the internet worked and they would make web sites filled with fax documents that you could have faxed to any number in the U.S. I would be a jerk and use it to send faxes to people who didn't own fax machines. Love your videos Gravis, been watching for a year now.
I had a great time! I love learning about "hidden" things in stuff I use everyday.
On a current Mac, if faxing functionality is available, "Fax PDF" appears as a destination in the Print dialog. The official help documentation actually seems to encourage sending PDFs by e-mail instead, which is a little odd. Opinions? In help articles?
How is that odd? It’s very sound advice.
The BLM Sticker and the LGBT VHS Sleve in the Back... I Love it! :-)
It even says 420 👍👍👍👍
Thanks for the video! I've always known this was possible, but I was just a teen in the 90s, so I didn't really care about faxing.
The subject is never boring, just the speaker. The fact that I watch the video till the very end can attest to that. Good Job.
I didn't expect to find a second bi tech icon but I'm glad to see it. ♥️
@@ericp3645 EposVox
💖💜💙
Back in 1994/95, I used to use my Dad’s Windows 3.x laptop PC to send FAXes.
I did this because in those early Internet days, not every business yet had a web page, so in many cases, if you wanted a physical catalog, you needed to call the company, or mail them a letter, asking them to mail back a catalog.
At the time, long distance calls were generally still a “pay per call” thing, with rates varying with time of day, day of week, etc.
I found that I preferred to compose a catalog request on the PC, and FAX it to the company during off-peak calling rate times, which was cheaper than a stamp, and negated the need for me to speak to someone on the phone during (high rate) business hours, and eliminated transcription errors that could occur when speaking my mailing address.
Also, quality on the receiving end of a FAX composed in the PC was quite good, especially when selecting the high-quality mode (200DPI x 200DPI).
Ahh, the “Olden Days”…
I used to do IT for small businesses in the mid 2000s and we would set up a fax modem in their windows server and configure it to send the incoming faxes to a shared folder in Exchange. The users would see the incoming faxes in Outlook alongside their emails. We could control which users had access to the faxes with Active Directory.
And for sending faxes, the virtual fax printer is great. You can share that virtual printer with all the PCs on the network the same way you would share any other printer. You only need one fax modem, and any PC on the network can "print" to it.
The offices typically had at least one physical fax machine which they used for things that were already on paper, and to act as a backup. The fax modem would be set to pick up on 1 ring, and the physical fax machine was to pick up on 3 rings, so if the fax server wasn't working right and failed to pick up the line, it would failover and get printed out on paper.
The faxing software included with PCs, laptops and retail modems was usually glitchy. The customers always thought it was their modem, it never was.
A minute in and I'm subscribed. Damn. You're fucking chill and I love it.
this is the video that make me fall in love with this channel - it's the perfect combination of a complete revelation and absolute dedication to an absurdly niche topic
My first memory of faxing was, in fact, my father faxing me a Scooby-Do Coloring book to the Windows 95 machine from his job at Radio-Shack. I don't think we ever used it for anything else, but from that moment on, I knew that the computer could be used as a fax machine.
Which became irritating when I switched to Cable internet, needed to fax something, and couldn't due to the lack of a modem. There's a certain sort of frustration that can only come from missing the last piece of a puzzle...
When I was the systems administrator for a company in the late 90's I setup a dedicated fax server running on Windows 3.11 so everyone could send faxes from their PC's so yes, it was available out of the box from Microsoft way back then.