Steve Jobs on Faxing: Better Than a Fax Machine

It's very fast. Now this is a very nice testimonial, and we might like to fax this to some of our software developers so that they could see for themselves how fast the o 40 is. Under normal circumstances, I would print this out on our 400 dot per inch laser printer. It would come out very nicely. And I would go get a nice fax machine, so say a nice $3,000 Canon fax machine, and I would fax it. And what would come out the other end would not quite look as good as what I put in, but indeed it would get there. We have eliminated the need to print anything out on a laser printer. We have eliminated the need to go searching through the office to find the fax machine wherever somebody may have moved it. We have eliminated the need to go buy a $3,000 fax machine, and we have dramatically improved the output that arrives at the other end.

Let me show you what I mean. Normally, on the next machine, when you wanna print something out, you go to the print menu. You push it and up pops a print panel, looks something like this. And you can select what type of printer you wanna use, etcetera, and you just normally push this button called print. Well, we've added a new button to our release two point o software that appears in every single application, and it's called the fax button. You push the fax button and you get a new panel which is the fax panel. And in the fax panel, all of the people that you stored phone... Fax phone numbers for appear and you can pick one Motorola, Lotus, etcetera, etcetera. And of course, these are fake fax numbers. And so let's say I'm going to send this to Adobe. And of course, I can add numbers, delete numbers, etcetera. I can ask for a notification in the mail system whenever the fax is delivered, cover letters, etcetera.

And I simply push this fax button over here. And when I push this fax button, a remarkable thing happens. Normally, everything you see on the screen of a next computer goes through Postscript, which means that the file is sent through Postscript and Postscript is turned to 92 dots per inch and it... We image the file on the screen. That same file is sent through postscript when the knob is turned to 400 dots per inch to go through our laser printer. We take that exact same file and we feed it through PostScript with the knob turned at 200 dots per inch, which is the group three international fax standard. We then compress it with our special software and send it out through one $500 fax modem, which can be shared over the network with up to a 100 people.

And it is then sent on its way to the fax printer down the road. When it gets there, the printer will print out something that looks substantially better than any fax you've ever seen before because our postscript software does a much better job of rendering the fax with high fidelity than the scanner on modern fax machines does, and you have to see this for yourself to believe it. So we have built in now a way to fax that is substantially better than faxing by hand on the best fax machine and save you from running all over the office because it's totally electronic and takes advantage of next networks.