Uh, there was no clear business need. Businesses were fine with using fax machines and the telephone. If there was a clear business need, XEROX would have capitalized on it since they had some of the first networked PCs.
A couple decades ago laptops & smartphones were still out of reach for students and most business people didn't need them either, so they were much less popular.
Land lines were still almost universal, even though they have always been somewhat expensive. The Bell telephone monopoly was required to subsidize residential lines by charging higher prices for business customers.
Broadband internet was still uncommon and dial-up was still spreading fast. By 2001 most Windows PCs had built-in phone modems easily sending and recieving faxes as files over any convenient land line wall jack without need for a fax machine, using the Windows XP Faxing & Scanning routine not much differently than back under W9x, when laptops were much more rare and usually needed peripheral modems.
A scanner was only needed for faxing pieces of paper which you did not have in a printable Windows file format, and a Windows printer was only needed when you wanted pieces of paper from the fax files you received.
Printing apps, like Word, Excel, or Acrobat could select Windows fax output as if it was a printer and it would call your target phone number and print on their machine, retrying if the line was busy, and recalling at intervals if needed. Regardless if the target fax number had a real fax machine connected or another PC modem set for fax-receive mode.
Of course all of this was available for DOS before Windows became popular, using third party software, it's just the kind of thing office people wouldn't want to do without if the electronics is the least bit capable.
And the real smartphones, which were already disappearing before the arrival of iPhones and other touchscreen models, had built-in analog phone modems. When you connected the phone to your laptop using IR, USB or the later Bluetooth, then Windows drivers were installed including a virtual COM port. The modem in the phone would then connect to the PC COM port and behave similar to the first external phone modems, as the modems were designed to interace the COM port on the back of an IBM PC or mainframe to an ordinary telephone line.
Before cellular carriers offered a data plan you could still dial-up to AOL and get on the web to browse or email, or directly call or receive calls from fax machines. Anywhere you had cellular service and battery power.
As for Gravis, I would hope the old DOS drivers for Gravis joysticks of the '80's are still there in Windows for when you plug in a soundcard having an analog joystick/midi port. Naturally this had some of the most useful settings for non-Gravis joysticks . . .
I've always wondered what to make of that quip because for the space of about 10 years, between 1980-1990 give or take, the fax machine was critical infrastructure for basically any business with a telephone line. faxes were a major deal and are still very much essential in certain fields
Paul Krugman was mostly right on both accounts...but for the wrong reasons.
The fax machine was a sea change when it was introduced. It absolutely was the one communications device every business had to have. It revolutionized white collar businesses and the sales process (imagine! transcontinental signed sales agreements within minutes!). Hell, the catalog industry (upon which the founding laws of e-commerce rest) owes its existence to the fax machine! Krugman misunderstood how important the fax machine was to businesses.
And he was right about the number of jobs for IT specialists, which has been declining for the past decade as IT operations are increasingly outsourced (even as other technology-related fields programming/design/etc have vastly grown) to foreign countries or specialized operators (i.e, Google Apps, Office 365, Amazon AWS, Salesforce, etc).
That's because dedicated fax machines mostly died out in the late 90s when multi-function machines and software modems arrived.
I was working at Office Max at the time and the transition happened fast. We went from having more than eight dedicated fax machine models down to one or two.
The first multi-function machines looked like fax machines and could function without a PC but we're so much better when connected to a PC.
Cheap software modems allowed people to send and receive faxes without owning a dedicated machine. I remember eMachines bundled software with their PCs to make them effectively behave like a fax machine. Later they pushed the eFax internet based fax software.
It's crazy that many business transactions still require Fax but the machines don't really exist. We needed to send/receive faxes to purchase a home last year as PDF/email was unacceptable. I was able to create a virtual Fax Server using Twilio in a couple hours and deal with these silly requirements.
Sadly Twilio is shutting down their Fax service later this year and the suggested alternative is vastly more expensive.
I'm not looking for startup ideas in this domain, I was just wondering "in general". If the PC + printer is already there (surely it has to be for accounting, etc.) why have a fax.
But ok, if the fax and the phone line cost next to nothing and it "just works", then sure it makes a lot of sense.
Faxing did exist essentially as soon as they came up with wirephoto. It was just really, really expensive for a long time, and you got a better average benefit out of a long distance call or telegram.
And this is the essence of the issue: complexity in one place often makes simplicity elsewhere.
Did it make sense for Microsoft Word back in the day to have a Fax option? Of course not. Unless you had a fax machine and needed to do a lot of faxing, then it was super convenient that your word processor knew exactly how to do that.
Back when the fax process was first being implemented, it would have been a convenient advancement. So while your point does have general merit, it's not particularly applicable here.
This product seems to be more about sending a file to another FAX machine that accepts files, presumably so you didn't have to own a MODEM.
They got this wrong.
In the days when FAX was used for things like sending purchase orders, what was needed was a means of putting a file on a floppy, walking to the FAX machine, then sending off a 'PDF' from there, removing the need to print out the form first.
Faxes were still sent a decade ago for this type of task, however, in a big office you had just the one physical FAX machine rather than everyone having a MODEM at their desk. It would take a little while to get things printed and shoved through the FAX machine, saving to disk would have cut down on the paper and enabled clearer documents to be sent.
Millions of people must have insisted that they didn't a have a fax machine and completely missed that it was build into the computer they were using and fully supported by the fax modem in their machine.
They're definitely not obsolete, at least outside of technology companies. Many businesses use a fax machine on a daily basis to send documents and order forms, as it's much easier than scanning things and then emailing them.
Faxes have become a largely digital thing, as there are various digital fax services. Neither side needs to have a phone connection that can support it. The fax services just need to be able to communicate to each other.
I was in a radiology startup for a bit, and getting people to fill out forms on something like an iPad is still a problem. You need staff able to help them, and people damage or try to steal them. So then you end up with paperwork, and if that paperwork needs to move somewhere else, people fax it.
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