Fax Machines: Why Are They Still Relevant Today?
In its heyday, fax and copy machines stood tall and evolved as the darling of all document transmission devices. Offices and even residences relied heavily on the capability of the fax and copy machine.
However, like a soldier, fax and copy machines will never die but fade away in importance as other devices come into the real world. Their demise could never be catalogued as some parts of the modern society has not moved on and embrace the emergence of new technology. The baby boomers generation for instance belong to this, as they matured in conjunction with the fax machines.
The technology that threatened the existence of fax machine is the Internet, as it evolved to be a better alternative. Take note that fax transmission makes use of the phone line to transmit information, and problems are aplenty concerning the use. Since fax devices transforms information into sound datum, the transmission protocol appears to be complicated aside from being very noisy.
On the other end of the lever is fax messaging online, the new technology that makes use of the Internet to communicate. Messages are prepared in the computer and once completed are sent directly to the receiving computer printer setup. The receiver has the option to just look at the message encoded into the computer monitor or use the printer for a hard copy. The process is simple, easy and utterly noise free.
With online fax messaging appearing to be a better option, why do fax machines still lives today? The reason could be nostalgic on the part of the baby boomers generation having existed practically together. Or certain applications mandates the use of fax machines over that of fax online. Doctors and lawyers for instance still rely on the age old fax machines to send documents and the reason vary.
Doctors on one end are governed by the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), which mandates that documents transmitted between doctors, labs, and insurers have to be secure. Over time this HIPAA provision has been interpreted by most practicing medical professionals to mean only fax and copy machine messaging and not something else like email which is more secure.
Lawyers on the other end, argues that fax and copy machines offer them convenience, since they do not have a list of email addresses making it doubly hard to send documents to clients. While fax messaging rely on the phone line, allowing lawyers easy access to addresses in the phone directory. Also with fax, sent messaging are provided with confirmation that it was received, while email recipient need to open the computer to read the message.
At the end of the day any reason to kill the fax and copy machine will undoubtedly fail, because some segment of the present day society are still rooted into the age old machine.
Leave a Reply