paul@csnz.co.nz (Paul Gillingwater) (08/08/89)
Hmmm... (Long musing follows on what FAX machines *could* be...) Fax cards for PC's. This seems to be a growing market, and now of course there are UNIX drivers for the things, however I think a fundamental error has been made. FAX transmission and reception is a fairly intensive activity in terms of I/O -- incoming FAXes especially can take hundreds of kb, and they have to be ready at anytime. With most computers, 24 hour access is rare -- e.g. the system may be down for maintenance, or doing an fsck. My proposal is: why not treat a FAX machine as a peripheral device, via a serial port? Has this been done? Is there a FAX machine which one can send an X.400 mail message to, which can add its own selected headers, compress it for Group III or IV, and add it to its own queue for transmission, possibly to a pre-selected distribution list? My dream FAX would have its own disk drive (3.5" DOS format) for spooling incoming, and have a printer port (with a range of drivers which are setup-selectable, such as Epson, HP Laserjet, PostScript, etc.), as well as an optional FAX-type printer. Optional modules for the FAX would enable its scanner to store the image as Group III or IV, and also output the image(s) to disk as TIFF, GIF, PCX or what-have-you. The scanner should be able to do OCR as well, and also be able to function as a simple photocopier. So am I dreaming? Why can't I just treat a FAX machine as a spool queue, able to accept X.400 or RFC message formats? I'm convinced this is better than an inboard FAX board in a UNIX box. Of course you might be able to achieve some of this functionality with a cheap PC linked via a LAN... but why not add the intelligence to the FAX machine, and have optional interfaces such as V.24, SNA, IEEE-802.3, SCSI or Centronics? Sigh.... -- Paul Gillingwater, Computer Sciences of New Zealand Limited Bang: ..!uunet!dsiramd!csnz!paul Domain: paul@csnz.co.nz Call Magic Tower BBS V21/23/22/22bis 24 hrs +0064 4 767 326
dag@fciva.FRANKLIN.COM (Daniel A. Graifer) (08/08/89)
In article <90@csnz.co.nz> paul@csnz.co.nz (Paul Gillingwater) writes: ... Lot's of stuff justifying: >So am I dreaming? Why can't I just treat a FAX machine as a >spool queue, able to accept X.400 or RFC message formats? >I'm convinced this is better than an inboard FAX board in a >UNIX box. Of course you might be able to achieve some of this >functionality with a cheap PC linked via a LAN... but why not >add the intelligence to the FAX machine, and have optional >interfaces such as V.24, SNA, IEEE-802.3, SCSI or Centronics? >-- >Paul Gillingwater, Computer Sciences of New Zealand Limited >Bang: ..!uunet!dsiramd!csnz!paul Domain: paul@csnz.co.nz >Call Magic Tower BBS V21/23/22/22bis 24 hrs +0064 4 767 326 It seems to me that, given the degree of functionality and flexibility you are asking for, and given the direction of hardware prices, the ideal solution to you dream is exactly what you said: Buy a cheap PC, put a faxboard and whatever communication controllers and printers you want on it, and run unix on it to manage the queues and device drivers. You might want to add a DSP board of some kind if you have a heavy load, but I doubt that would be necessary. The cheapest programmable fax machine I've seen is about $1400. Buy a pc w/monochrome monitor ($1300?), a fax board ($400), unix ($500), and a laser printer ($1600?), and you have $3800 system that does what you want, and allows for future expansion. Dan
david@ms.uky.edu (David Herron -- One of the vertebrae) (08/10/89)
Remember that every piece of equipment has downtime, be it a
toaster oven or an ultra-reliable-computer-system-with-replicated-
hardware. To be truly useful the protocols for doing e-mail
over FAX will have to take that into account and spool things
when it can't get through.
--
<- David Herron; an MMDF guy <david@ms.uky.edu>
<- ska: David le casse\*' {rutgers,uunet}!ukma!david, david@UKMA.BITNET
<-
<- "So raise your right hand if you thought that was a Russian water tentacle."GPWRDCS@gp.govt.nz (Don Stokes, GPO) (08/12/89)
In article <90@csnz.co.nz>, paul@csnz.co.nz (Paul Gillingwater) writes: >[much carrying on about attaching fax to a computer] > Of course you might be able to achieve some of this > functionality with a cheap PC linked via a LAN... Well, we (GPO) pulled off a such a scheme by parking a PC (cheapish AT) on Ethernet and running DECnet/DOS and talking to it from VAXes. The system worked by having the a batch file on the PC (running MS-DOS) looking at a virtual disk located on the VAX and testing if any files were present. If any were found, they would be passed to the fax board for transmission and deleted. Sending a fax was a simple matter of formatting the message into a bit-map (this was a quick-n-dirty - this part of the job could always be done on the PC) and dropping the file into a directory on the VAX. Very simple, used off-the-shelf software and hardware for the actual transmission, and the PC could easily be taken offline and used as a PC without any loss of transmission (ie transmission would resume as soon as the batch file was re-started). The fax board was capable of receiving faxes while the PC was in use. I don't think this feature was used in the application being developed. > Call Magic Tower BBS V21/23/22/22bis 24 hrs +0064 4 767 326 I do. Don Stokes, Systems Programmer / / Domain: don@gp.govt.nz Government Printing Office, /GP/ PSImail: PSI%0530147000028::DON Wellington, New Zealand / / Bang: ...!uunet!vuwcomp!windy!gpwd!don -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Machines work, people should think.