Winn L. Rosch Hardware Bible, Sixth Edition

Chapter 27. Fax

Fax, short for facsimile transmissions, gives the power of Star Trek's transporter system (usually without the aliens and pyrotechnics) to anyone who needs to get a document somewhere else in the world at the speed of light. Although fax doesn't quite dematerialize paper, it does move the images and information a document contains across continents and reconstructs them at the end of its near-instantaneous travels. The recipient gets to hold in his own hands a nearly exact duplicate of the original, the infamous reasonable facsimile.

From that angle, fax is a telecopier—a Xerox machine with a thousand miles of wire between where you slide the original in and the duplicate falls out. In fact, a product called the Telecopier was ...