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From: hlison@bbn.com (Herb Lison)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.tcp-ip
Subject: Re: Fax over tcp/ip
Message-ID: <13228@silica.BBN.COM>
Date: 13 Nov 89 22:44:43 GMT
References: <8910131208.AA18264@iapetus.rice.edu> <2078@brazos.Rice.edu> <30@van-bc.UUCP> <8734@hoptoad.uucp>
Organization: BBN Laboratories Incorporated, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 30

gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:

>Clearly what we want on the Internet is more like what computer fax
>over phone lines should be doing (except that the designers of fax
>didn't think about extensibility, and the people who implement it are
>too busy (hacking slimy binary MSDOS software) to support real
>computers or consider the larger issues).  You should hand it a
>document in ANY format; it sends it to the recipient in the recipient's
>choice of format.  E.g. you hand it troff source; if the recipient can
>handle troff source, it gets sent that way; backoffs to ditroff
>intermediate form, PostScript, MacDraw, HPGL, bitmaps, G3 and G4 fax,
>etc, are all possible depending on what the recipient can handle.  This
>has to be negotiated separately for each recipient, since one could be
>a phone-fax relay service and another a window system or something.


Another alternative to FAX on the Internet, or networks in general, is
multimedia E-mail.  BBN/Slate is a product that allows the user to
e-mail documents containing text, graphics, spreadsheets, images (color,
as well as black and white), and even digitized voice, over standard
text mail systems, such as sendmail, MMDF.  Of course, for those
users without high performance workstations, FAX is still a good
way of getting multimedia material (albeit without the capability of
doing much more than looking at it), and we are implementing a FAX
handling capability in Slate.

Anyone interested in getting more information can look in the October
issue of UNIX Review.

Herb Lison