Reminds me of hidden nuggets like Apple's Preview.app ability to add signatures to PDFs by scanning a photo using webcam or using your trackpad. When I tell people about this one feature, there's always a sigh of frustration that they've been printing out docs, signing them and then re-scanning them or using expensive dedicated tools.
Whats fantastic about this is how much Microsoft backwards compatibility extends. Fax is not a common use case in 2020 it could have been a separate application (even for an extra charge) but in order not to break the workflow of people upgrading its kept alive and bundled.
On the one hand, the extreme level of backward compatibility is pretty great - it’s very rare that software stops working just because you upgrade Windows. In a business setting that is absolutely crucial, particularly given that there are so many companies in the world using software and databases that were written 15-20 years ago.
On the other hand, all of this weight has to go somewhere and that’s a pretty large part of why even fresh Windows installs have such a significant footprint. It might not be obvious on a typical desktop PC, but on many low-end tablets and laptops, it can eat a large amount of the already-restrictive storage space. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this is a part of why Windows struggles to maintain popularity in the tablet space outside of the Surface line, and the Surfaces aren’t exactly entry-level.
I think it’s fine for things like this to be optional - given that fax isn’t widely used in a lot of the world, it seems like a strange thing to install by default.
Also: the new-ish Windows "Scan" app will scan to PDF, which the "Windows Fax and Scan" app couldn't. Perfectly servicable for periodic light use, and you don't have to install whatever kludge came with your cheap multifunction printer/scanner.
there are many applications that Microsoft have included with windows that are very well thought out.
Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) was just an app on top of XP/Vista/7 (though unchanged in 7, and then killed), but was is still so loved by those who use it that they figured out how to extract it from Win7 and install it on Win10.
It was honestly the best media center experience I've ever used on a PC (Tivo might be better in hardware, but never had one and it puts ever other setup box from a cable company to shame). It's simply a shame that it wasn't used by enough users that microsoft stopped developing it and effectively killed it.
The impression I got was MCE was killed not because few users were using it, but that it took power users to use it. Efforts like Windows Home Server mostly just proved that average consumers didn't want to run and configure a server environment in their home. Very rarely did people trying to use the MCE have the hardware they needed to support all of its features well.
That's why so much of the media control efforts got pushed to Xbox because at least with the Xbox they could control more of the hardware directly. (Then those efforts were sabotaged in the early days of the Xbox One by bad press, which was a terrible shame because they had a lot of great ideas half-executed.)
A couple decades ago laptops & smartphones were still out of reach for students and most business people didn't need them either, so they were much less popular.
Land lines were still almost universal, even though they have always been somewhat expensive. The Bell telephone monopoly was required to subsidize residential lines by charging higher prices for business customers.
Broadband internet was still uncommon and dial-up was still spreading fast. By 2001 most Windows PCs had built-in phone modems easily sending and recieving faxes as files over any convenient land line wall jack without need for a fax machine, using the Windows XP Faxing & Scanning routine not much differently than back under W9x, when laptops were much more rare and usually needed peripheral modems.
A scanner was only needed for faxing pieces of paper which you did not have in a printable Windows file format, and a Windows printer was only needed when you wanted pieces of paper from the fax files you received.
Printing apps, like Word, Excel, or Acrobat could select Windows fax output as if it was a printer and it would call your target phone number and print on their machine, retrying if the line was busy, and recalling at intervals if needed. Regardless if the target fax number had a real fax machine connected or another PC modem set for fax-receive mode.
Of course all of this was available for DOS before Windows became popular, using third party software, it's just the kind of thing office people wouldn't want to do without if the electronics is the least bit capable.
And the real smartphones, which were already disappearing before the arrival of iPhones and other touchscreen models, had built-in analog phone modems. When you connected the phone to your laptop using IR, USB or the later Bluetooth, then Windows drivers were installed including a virtual COM port. The modem in the phone would then connect to the PC COM port and behave similar to the first external phone modems, as the modems were designed to interace the COM port on the back of an IBM PC or mainframe to an ordinary telephone line.
Before cellular carriers offered a data plan you could still dial-up to AOL and get on the web to browse or email, or directly call or receive calls from fax machines. Anywhere you had cellular service and battery power.
As for Gravis, I would hope the old DOS drivers for Gravis joysticks of the '80's are still there in Windows for when you plug in a soundcard having an analog joystick/midi port. Naturally this had some of the most useful settings for non-Gravis joysticks . . .
I've seen this software since it's advent in Windows vista, but I could never ever do anything useful with it. It could not even take a simple TWAIN scan. And if it did, it was impossible to export the image in a suitable format. Something which virtually every image editor on Windows with TWAIN functionality (even Paint, IIRC) could do easily.
I’d like to bring attention to the UI of this app. It’s fucking beautiful, it has a certain style/personality and isn’t an empty whitespace horror show that takes over your entire screen to display 2 lines of text.
I don't agree in this case, the Windows Scan app [0] contains all the features you'd need from a scanner app in a clear interface. It's like the hidden scan utility from macOS, for simple cases like scanning one you don't need a complicated app with a menu.
I vaguely remember this existing from the early 2000s.
That said, I recently decided to look into the fax machine protocol because there's a surprisingly large amount of legacy use in Japan and it seems like there's a good market to replace it with an app. You wouldn't even need to use VoIP because the hardware literally has a phone connection. In my research I found an early stack overflow thread from the 2010s where I learned that the thing protecting the fax industry is a ton of obtuse standards that require payment to access. What little documentation I did find came from an obscure public information server on the ITU website. Apparently there are 3 generations of protocol. The first generation worked like scan lines in a television except the carrier frequency was audible and it was very slow scan (a few min per frame/page). The later revisions were digital in nature and from what I understood they compress the scan into continuous regions of white and dark. The exact compression scheme was very obtuse so that's where I gave up. I also could not figure out the handshake part of the protocol which happens when the call first connects. Good luck to anyone who wants to pick up where I left off.
