FACSIMILE MACHINE
An input scanner can be used to transmit images over a telecommunications link to a remote printer. This principle has been in use commercially for news photograph transmission since 1930s. Combined send/receive machines suitable for office use became widely available in 1960s, and between 1980 and 1987 the number of machines connected to the world-wide telephone network grew from a quarter of a million to two million. Facsimile provides very fast transmission of almost any documentary material without specialist preparation. However, between 2 million and 10 million bits are required for a raster scan of an A4 page; this has to be compared with 20000 bits for a similar-sized page of ASCII-coded characters. This added transmission ...
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