Fax would hit the market. Xerox continued to refine the fax machine for years after their ground-breaking first machine. In later years it would be combined with copier equipment to create the hybrid machines we have today that copy, scan and fax. Some of the lesser known capabilities of the Xerox fax technologies included their Ethernet enabled Fax Services on their 8000 workstations in the early 1980s. Prior to the introduction of the ubiquitous fax machine, one of the first being the Exxon Qwip in the mid-1970s, facsimile machines worked by optical scanning of a document or drawing spinning on a
Internet fax to scan documents and send them as a fax. Some providers also offer the option to get a dedicated fax number and receive fax on this number. The Internet has enabled the development of several other methods of sending and receiving a fax. The more common method is an extension of computer-based faxing, and involves using a fax server/gateway to the Internet to convert documents between faxes and emails. The process is often referred to as "fax to mail" or "mail to fax". This technology offers the advantage of dispensing with the machine as well as the additional telephone line,