Steve Jobs on Fax and OCR: From fax to editable text
What Jobs talks about
Jobs demonstrates how incoming faxes are collected into a central folder and viewed in a fax reader program on NeXT. He shows a fax from Adobe and explains that, by itself, it can be read but not edited.
He then shows how a third-party service, OCR servant from HSD, can convert the fax into editable text. After that, he changes the font and even looks up a word in Webster’s from the OCR’d text.
The demo illustrates Jobs’s larger point: software services can turn static information into something flexible and useful, moving from viewing to editing to reference tools.
Jobs speaks throughout.
In his words
“Save paper, save a tree.”
“But unfortunately, I can't edit it.”
“I can do so much more.”
“I want to OCR the selection that I just made.”
“I can edit it to my heart's delight.”
Key points
- Incoming faxes are routed into one central folder for easy distribution and access.
- The fax reader displays the fax exactly as it was received from the modem.
- A third-party OCR service can convert selected fax text into editable text.
- The font panel lets users change typography on the converted text very easily.
- The services menu can connect OCR text to other tools, like Webster’s lookup.
- The demo shows how NeXT turns a fax into part of a broader workflow.
Full transcript
Happens when we get an incoming fax. When we get an incoming fax, all the incoming faxes are sent to one central folder and can be distributed by a person throughout the mail system, or you can just look there to find your incoming faxes. And we have a fax reader program that comes with the system that shows you exactly what a fax looks like. And this is captured right off the fax modem. This is a fax from John Warnick at Adobe, the CEO of Adobe. And I can actually read it here, save paper, save a tree. But unfortunately, I can't edit it. And if I cut it and paste it and wanna put it in other applications, I have to just treat it as a picture because, of course, it's just a fax.
But in the next system, I can do so much more. I can select this right in the fax reader program, and I can go back to our menu of services. And one of the services that has been created by one of our third parties, HSD, is called OCR servant, optical character recognition. And I can say I want to OCR the selection that I just made. And down here, the OCR servant from HSD runs. It automatically picks up all the data from the last application and puts it in my window here fully OCR ed. And I can then go and say I want to change the font on this by bringing up our font panel. I'll stick with Helvetica maybe, make it 24. As you can see, our font panel allows us to change the fonts on anything very, very easily. And here we go, nice big Helvetica and as you can see of course, I can edit it to my heart's delight.
I can even pick a word like software, go to the services menu, look it up in Webster's. Here we go. So we've gone from a mail message with an incoming fax to looking at that fax with a fax reader program to OCR ing that fax with a third party OCR program to looking up a word in the OCR fax in our Webster's dictionary.
Transcribed from the audio by speech recognition (Deepgram). Timestamps link to the video above. Errors are possible.