So I know that when you want to fax something you put the piece of paper in a fax machine, dial a number and then somewhere on another fax machine a piece of paper comes through with the same information on.
What I don’t understand is how does that work? I’m assuming the first machine scans the paper but how does it send that information via a fax number to another machine and that machine knows exactly what to print?
In: Technology
It uses the cables/phone lines the same way a landline phone does.
You put a document in, it scans it, and from that scan it sends a signal through the line that the other fax machine receives and uses that as instructions of what it needs to print.
Imagine it like Morse code, where one human would send electrical signals through a line, another human would listen to the beeps those signals make, translate those into letters, and then have the full message the other end were sending.
But instead of a human writing letters, it’s a printer dropping ink onto paper at specified points.
The fax machine dials a number, like a phone, and when phone connection is established, it converts the scanned paper into data stream, sends it over, where the second machine converts it back and prints it.
However, now it works differently. I worked as administrative assistant at one company, and we used a service which collects all fax messages sent to our company, converts them to normal e-mail and sends it to us. So when someone sent us fax message, we got it in the form of e-mail, since we had no fax machine at all (fax is kind of dead now).
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