Funny thought: tech is moving so fast yet I’ve asked hundreds of people how a fax machine works & no one has a coherent answer.
Forget the phone; how the hell does a persons actual voice (not robotic sound) travel thru the air so that the other person knows with one sound it’s you? Gtfooh if you think you know. It’s magic man.
Paper is scanned via a digital copier, converted into a series of black and white dots. These dots are converted into a black space optimised compression algorithm.
This compressed data is sent down a phone line via a modem which works by modulating and demodulating electrical impulses (1's and 0's) through the phone line.
At the other end the process is reversed and a remote photocopy is produced by thermal printing on heat sensitive paper.
I can Google as well:)
Now explain how it’s done from a plane flying 300mph over Japan, while sending the perfect image of the Mona Lisa to a small office in the outskirts of New Mexico (instantly). Magic. Air. Vibrations. Poof. Clouds. Wires. Electricity. Compression. Sound waves. Dots.
I didn’t Google, I’m an electronics and computer engineer by training, and I used them in the 1980’s.
Never from a plane though and I had a large office, so I have no concept of small offices.
Also my private Jet doesn’t fly that slow, so I can’t empathise with that kind of plane.
Holy shit. I had no idea. Those credentials. Oh my. I’ve got to check you out for reals now. What shitcoin should I buy - ETH fax? I’m in.
Some cool facts about the fax:
It was invented in Japan.
The west had Telex machines, which allowed us to send messages around the world almost instantly, but the Japanese hadn't invented a practical Kanji keyboard at this point, so had no way to "type" their character set, so they invented the fax (or faxsimile - facsimile) which allowed them to handwrite Kanji characters as well as do drawings to communicate.
It turned out it was a lot easier to use and more useful than a Telex, so it quickly caught on in the west and shortly overtook the Telex machine as the prime method of written communication.
Feel free to Google a telex.
In all seriousness, thanks for playing. Appreciate the engagement.
Thanks for getting me to remember 40 year old technology 😃
Mike, I’m a born in the 70’s guy so no spring chicken. Been in software my whole career, the big boys like Oracle early on & mostly startups since 2012. I hate the cloud, I hate Kunernetes, I hate the centralization push at most companies. AI scares the crap out of me etc etc.
I truly do come back to how a phone & fax actually work as just pure magic. VMWare tech blew me away in its early days too. We lived through some of the most exciting tech times & hard to replicate that. Cloud ain’t it. DevSecOps ain’t it. It’s why I fell deep into BTC. Layers on top of BTC IS the future and will amaze IMO. Have a great day.
I don't hate the cloud, but it is moving to become decentralised through platforms like Nextcloud and DeFi Crypto protocols such a Filecoin.
Have patience!
What has baffled me about that, and you’ve reminded me, is how the hell a sound can even reach another person’s ear mechanism to be interpreted as a sound to begin with, given that space (like time) is infinitely divisible. The same with sight, how can a light photon ever reach a person’s eye to be interpreted as something? How can a moment of time that it takes to even do all of this ever pass if it’s infinitely divisible?
Seems to me that there is another dimension which transcends distance and time constraints and enables “interpretation”
