Many of our readers have an interest in satellite business and technology. They will find SATNEWS, a bulletin of news related to the field of satellite broadcasting, most informative. SATNEWS is published by M2 Communications Limited in the UK and appears in hardcopy as well as an electronic newsletter. The electronic version is free of charge and is sent once a fortnight. There is also a companion magazine, Data Broadcasting News, distributed by fax.
GLOSAS News will periodically carry items from SATNEWS by agreement with its editor.
For further information contact:
Mr. Darren P. Ingram, Editor,
dbn@dims.demon.co.uk
SATNEWS
DIMS, 184 Brookside Avenue
Coventry CV5 8AD, U.K.
Fax: +44-0-203-717-418
This copyrighted chart, intended for the satellite television
hobbyist, is produced by Robert Smathers of Albuquerque, New
Mexico, USA (roberts@triton.unm.edu). It can be retrieved via FTP
from SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL (or its mirrors) in the pd1:
The year 1993 is the 150th anniversary of the FAX! The first
patent was granted in 1843 to Scottish physicist Alexander Bain.
The gadget evolved into telephoto devices used by newspapers for
transmitting pictures. It was not until the 1980s when the CCITT
Group III standards were established that the modern FAX took off.
This (to me) surprising information is contained in the January
1993 issue of Vision 2,000: Networking the Global Village, a
newsletter of Vision 2,000 Inc., Ottawa, Canada. The editorial,
"FAX, The Sleeping Giant", presents the reader with additional
gems.
As of 1991, 5% of homes (presumably in Canada) had fax machines
while only 2% had a computer modem (some of which may not
have been in use). The fax market is 10 times the size of the
email market and growing twice as fast. Fax is the second largest
traffic element on the PSTN (ordinary telephone lines) following
voice. On certain overseas circuits, especially after business
hours, up to 80% of the traffic is fax. It is forecast that by
the year 2,000, 40% of homes will have fax machines and one third
of all telephone nodes will have a fax device connected to them.
Fax machines, already relatively easy to use, are getting to
be even easier to carry around, program and combine with other
information technology. The AT&T Easylink mailbox has now been
extended to hold email, EDI, fax and voice at the same time,
making it possible to send voice annotated faxes and email.
Another AT&T gadget combines the functions of a portable computer,
cellular phone, and fax modem with a glass handwriting tablet that
fits in the palm of a hand. Called personal digital assistants
(PDAs), such gadgets are expected to permit the sending and
receiving of faxes as well as full motion TV-mail "in a few short
years" (see the January issue of The Futurist for more on PDAs).
The Japanese have begun operation of a fax network which
connects subscribing businesses (at $8,000 a pop) with 40,000
homes for the purpose of customer surveys and distribution of
discount coupons and other business mail. The homes pay a low
$8/month fee but the day can not be too far when fax machines will
be given away to households willing to receive "junk mail" by this
means! Other networks in Japan serve the purpose of after-hour
distance education and provide a wealth of information to the
student.
Fax databases are becoming increasingly widespread in Japan
and the U.S. Called FaxBacks or Faxes on Demand, they provide
callers with requested information by sending it to their fax
machines. Organizations as different as the U.S. Department of
Commerce, U.S. Cancer Institute and Sears all have a similar
service. Sears advertises its "Sale of the Week" by this means.
A California company, Software Ventures, has integrated
multimedia, faxing and interactive communications in their Microphone II
for Windows. Voice or video messages can be attached to
faxes and sent to and played back on another PC which runs the
same program. Adobe, NEC and Compaq have announced a new PostScript
standard which permits sending PostScript files directly to
a fax machine and can be used for distance publishing by circumventing
the present ASCII conversion format loss familiar to email
users. Finally, FAXCAST offers the capability of sending a fax to
1,000 or even 1,000,000 fax machines simultaneously by employing
TV's Vertical Blanking Interval (VBI) as a carrier for the purpose
of broadcasting (!) the faxed messages. Following is a portion of
an electronic advertisement by TeleText Inc. for a service based
on the use of VBI for the purpose of disseminating information to
individual households. It illustrates the technique rather well:
For the first time, you can use your personal computer to
receive stock, news, sports, traffic, weather and other
important news information through normal commercial, cable or
satellite TV signals with the TeleText Decoder card without
the need and expense of modems, telephone lines or SERVICES
FEES. ... TeleText offers PC users the ability to view,
capture, store and print TeleText information pages easily and
quickly by simply connecting the Teletext Decoder card to a
conventional TV antenna or cable hook-up and tuning to a
TeleText services TV channel (such as CNBC/FNN or The Home
Shopping Network). You can receive this TEXT-data directly to
your PC.
Faxing is easier to learn and teach to staff. It is usually
faster, and can transmit complex graphics and pictures. However,
in the past the received text could not be manipulated. This
inflexibility was a major shortcoming of faxing. Enter optical
character recognition (OCR) software which permits conversion of
received text files into character files. The latter can be
edited by a word processor and stored in a database or analyzed in
a spreadsheet (see PC Magazine, Dec. 8, 1992).
The greatest advantage of faxing (other than the fact that you
don't need to type :-)) is that one simply plugs into the local
telephone network. No need for an ID or a password, which is
required of email users. Thus, while access to email is location
or "node" bound, faxing is not.
Faxing uses up paper and runs into busy lines. However, both
problems are correctable, possibly by the same technique. If fax
messages can arrive and be stored in an electronic fax-mail-box
both problems are solved. One only prints what one wants to read!
Furthermore, if the mail-box is properly set up, say, by the local
phone utility, there is no busy line problem. And if
fax-mail-boxes make sense, why not packet switched faxing?! At a
discount!
The question is: Is this faxing or is it email via PSTN?
Well, I guess it doesn't matter so long as it works! And it is
working better and better so that we can finally forget all this
electronic wizardry and refocus on the content of what is being
sent!
This is the message of an original contribution emailed (!) to
your editor by Mr. David Boulton, President/CEO of DiaCom Technologies,
Inc., a company "committed to acting as if the most precious natural
resource on planet Earth is our human capacity for
learning". According to the author, "DiaCom is developing technologies,
both electronic and social to fulfill that commitment (to
developing the human potential)".
I enjoyed reading David's article and thought that it contained
an important message for would-be global educators. I am
reprinting it in the following Part III.
Return to GLOSAS News Contents for this issue.
URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/globe31.htm
March 1993
c) An Homage to Facsimile (by your Ed.)
Will fax overtake email? Or, will the two merge?!!
GLOSAS NEWS was orinally posted to the WWW at URL: http://library.fortlewis.edu/~instruct/glosas/cont.htm by Tina Evans Greenwood, Library Instruction Coordinator, Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado 81301, e-mail: greenwood_t@fortlewis.edu, and last updated May 7, 1999. By her permission the whole Website has been archived here at the University of Tennessee server directory of GLOSAS Chair Dr. Takeshi Utsumi from July 10, 2000 by Steve McCarty in Japan.