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 usually another fax machine, which then transforms these pulses into images, and prints them on paper. The traditional method requires a phone line, and only one fax can be sent or received at a time. The phone connection must not be a packet-based system in which delays can occur—a VoIP connection will not work well without special precautions (T.38-compliant equipment at both ends). Internet fax achieves a dramatic reduction in communication costs especially when long faxes are frequently exchanged with overseas or distant offices. Since there is no telephone connection charge when sending a fax over the Internet, the cost