FAX on SUN (and other UNICES)

[Dan Ts'o]

We have been investigating this and related questions and haven't arrived
at a definitive answer yet. However, since half of the equation in our
case was to provide standard, stand-alone FAX machine operation (w/
scanner), we went ahead and purchased the Canon 705 (roughly $3000). It
seemed to be one of the few with all the nice features, plenty of memory
AND a serial interface that claims to support full computer access. Most
other FAX machines that talk about serial interfaces end up only
supporting a printer-style interface. Big whoop.

A company in Chicago, LA Business systems, actually has written programs
to access the 705 and its bigger brother (9000?) via an IBM PC.  We are
looking into porting this program but are just as likely to write some
simple support from scratch.


A cursory glance at the manual suggests that it is not impossibly
difficult and even suggests that you needn't send the 705 G3 bitmaps,
although I know that is not a huge problem even if you did.

The LA Business Systems program is quite full-featured, allowing just
about all the various paths you might want: FAX image to CPU, CPU bitmap
to FAX, ASCII to FAX, ASCII to printer, CPU bitmap to printer, FAX to
disk, etc, etc.

So, we'll see how far we get, but you might want to look at the 705.

Of course XENIX users have all sorts of options on the IBM PC/AT bus and
maybe one should just setup a "cheap" Xenix box as a network FAX server...

Cheers,
Dan Ts'o		212-570-7671
Dept. Neurobiology	dan at rna.rockefeller.edu
Rockefeller Univ.	...cmcl2!rna!dan
1230 York Ave.		rna!dan at nyu.edu
NY, NY 10021		tso at rockefeller.arpa
tso at rockvax.bitnet