Re:Retrotechtacular: FAX as a Service in 1984
by Animats on Sunday November 06, 2016 @02:34PM
(#12886649)
Western Union tried something similar in 1952, called "Telecar". They had fax machines in small trucks, which would drive around and deliver telegrams.
This was an extension of Western Union's DeskFax service. Western Union offered this from the 1940s to the 1960s. They had a little desktop machine which could both scan and print on small pieces of paper. But it transmitted only to a Western Union office, where the message was manually retyped and sent through Western Union's Teletype-based message switching system.[2] At the receiving end, the Teletype output might be scanned and delivered to the end user's DeskFax.
Some people still have and restore these machines. The end-user machines won't talk peer to peer without a conversion unit in the middle, but it's not that hard to build one.
(How Western Union blew it as a business is an sad story. They were a nationwide digital communications company long before anybody else. But their management was very attached to their structure of vast numbers of retail offices and message delivery at a high price point.
Today's Western Union is just a name, bought by First Data for their money transfer service.)
This was an extension of Western Union's DeskFax service. Western Union offered this from the 1940s to the 1960s. They had a little desktop machine which could both scan and print on small pieces of paper. But it transmitted only to a Western Union office, where the message was manually retyped and sent through Western Union's Teletype-based message switching system.[2] At the receiving end, the Teletype output might be scanned and delivered to the end user's DeskFax.
Some people still have and restore these machines. The end-user machines won't talk peer to peer without a conversion unit in the middle, but it's not that hard to build one.
(How Western Union blew it as a business is an sad story. They were a nationwide digital communications company long before anybody else. But their management was very attached to their structure of vast numbers of retail offices and message delivery at a high price point.
Today's Western Union is just a name, bought by First Data for their money transfer service.)
[1] http://blog.modernmechanix.com/telecar/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAJQVStZYDk