We call it the world's most expensive fax machine, and we're only half joking. It takes up most of a worktable and shelf along one wall in our office.
We don't recommend that you run out and buy one just like it. But do keep your eyes and ears open. It won't be long before all the technology in our fax equipment will be practical and affordable for a great many offices. If you buy it in stages, you'll come out ahead.The visible hardware components in our system are a $4,669 Apple Macintosh IIcx computer, a $4,499 Apple LaserWriter IINT printer, a $1,799 Apple Scanner, a $699 Apple Fax Modem and a telephone. In the computer, instead of Apple's faxing software, we use $245 BackFax made by Solutions International (802-658-5506).
The fax software is what ties our assorted hardware into a fax machine. It takes any file on our computer and zaps it off to any distant point we name. It also receives any fax sent to our secret fax phone number, which we give out only in special circumstances. (Otherwise the public relations releases that flood our mailbox would be dumped into our computer, like it or not.)
Let's say we've typed a contract using a word processing program on the Mac. We put it into BackFax's MailSaver, which changes letters and numbers into language a fax machine understands. Then, using BackFax's entry screen, we type in the phone number to send the contract to (unless we've already entered the recipient in the BackFax phone book).
Stand-alone fax machines have built-in modems. They convert letters and numbers into a format that can be transmitted and received over ordinary telephone lines. Our expensive fax machine uses the modem to convert computer signals into phone signals.
BackFax sends the modem the number to dial. The modem dials it. If a fax on the other end of the line sends a signal that it's up and running, the letter zaps out of MailSaver and into the phone line. The recipient never knows that our message never once touched paper.
That's fine, you say - but what about papers we want to fax that aren't typed into the computer? Do we have to type them in to use this fax? That's where the Apple Scanner comes in. We put the paper on its copierlike image surface, load the AppleScan software it comes with and give the command that turns on the scanner. It translates pictures and words into computer language and stores the paper as a file.
Today's stand-alone fax machines come with small scanners built in. Our Mac system uses a separate machine connected via cabling.
All scanners are simply copy machines that hook up to computers. They come with software that controls how they copy: into digital electronic format instead of onto paper.
Instead of copying a whole piece of paper as one image, the way most copy machines work, scanners break down an entire document into 200 dots per inch. Each of those 200 dots is recorded as either black or white, and that record is stored on the computer's disk.
We can perform interesting feats of magic with these computer-stored images. It generally takes an expensive copier or fax machine to change page size and adjust contrast between light and dark. Scanners do both easily. They can increase or decrease size by any percent because the software that manages them easily pushes the 200 dots closer together or further apart.
A full-featured scanner also can make decent photographic reproductions. The scanner software forces the scanning equipment to convert a photograph into a halftone, a picture composed entirely of tiny dots. (Most newspapers have, for many years, converted pictures into halftones to accommodate their printing equipment.) If we send the picture file to our printer, we'll get as many copies as we like. And they will look as good as the output from those very new, very expensive digital copy machines.
Every fax machine needs some kind of printer so you can print out the faxes you receive. Most stand-alone fax machines have tiny built-in printers. Typically, they hammer out barely 75 dots per inch.
The Apple LaserWriter attached to the Mac reproduces computer files with clarity up to 300 dots per inch. In many cases, the faxes we receive look better than the originals! We can set the computer to send each fax we receive right to the printer. Or we can shortstop the process and save the fax on our computer disk as a data file. We can add special software that will turn it back into words so we can edit it on a word processor, something you can't do on a store-bought fax.
All the pieces in our World's Most Expensive Fax Machine (totaling a little under $12,000) can be used alone. In fact, we can be using our Mac for non-fax functions, such as word processing, while BackFax sends and receives fax messages. We can do the same thing with an IBM-type system.
Or we hope to. Most IBM fax systems work off circuit cards. (We examined one that doesn't, but we don't like its software.) One board broke in testing. Another's maker just laid off a major share of its work force. A third told us three times last year that they were shipping us a test model. It hasn't arrived yet.
That usually means one of two things: Customer support is poor, too. Or there's reluctance to have the board evaluated in our real-work testing environment.
We're determined to put an IBM installation together because we believe that stand-alone fax machines will give way to computer-integrated faxing in the next few years. With two differences. For one, you won't need a workbench and a shelf to hold it all. For two, it won't cost a small fortune.
(C)1990 P/K Associates Inc., 3006 Gregory Street, Madison WI 53711-1847.