Ah, reading for comprehension. I remember my dad bringing home one of the first telefaxes. And also “computer images” made from characters, sent over teletype machines.
In the 1920s?
Office faxes didn't really start to crop up until the 1980s. I remember several of us trying to figure out how to send a fax on a Saturday from a machine shared by 3 multi-billion dollar banks. That would probably have been in 1987. Before that, FedEx offered an expensive, and short lived, service to pick up your document, fax it to another FedEx office, and deliver it the same day.
Ah teletype. In ‘64 I keyed in orders for appliances. We received orders from salesmen/retailers on paper. The teletype spit out an 8 bit EBCDIC paper tape...Up to 8 holes side by side. Think of the old ticker tape. We would eyeball the tape for typos.
Then we would put the tape in the tape reader and send the orders to warehouses and factories all over the world ... but mostly in the Rust Belt.
I was fired for supporting Goldwater. My Dem Precinct captain called and had me fired. That gave me a lot of freedom.
We did those on ham radio RTTY too (I suppose some still do). At 45.5 Baud it could take many hours to send one of those pictures. My neighbor had a store & forward mailbox just for teletype pictures, ran on a Apple II+ with a custom RTTY modem board and a pair of 5 megabyte Rana hard disks.