FaxLeft
Encyclopedia
FaxLeft was a free distribution service operating in the Greater Toronto Area from 1993 to 1999. It started as a communication tool for the Union/Community Action Coalition (UCAC) that had formed to oppose the Social Contract announced by Bob Rae
in the spring of 1993.
At the time fax machines were the most common form of reaching a targeted audience. E-mail was becoming common but almost always as corporate systems that couldn't esily send or receive e-mail to outside groups. Most organizations had at least one fax machine and many individuals also had fax machines at home.
Fax modems were also readily available and almost always came with fax software. Gary Dale
, then President of OPSEU Local 508, was one of the early members of the UCAC and was also a systems analyst. When the subject of fax distribution came up, he immediately recognized the advantages of using a computer with a fax modem. Fortunately he already had both.
And so FaxLeft began. Members of UCAC would fax him their flyers and he would send them out. Since Dale was doing this from his home, the faxes were sent out overnight using his home telephone line so that he could still receive calls in the evening.
The initial fax list was populated from lists provided by UCAC members. These had to be manually entered into WinFax before they could be used. The initial list was only about 100 numbers and there were few faxes.
Through 1994 FaxLeft went through a steady growth in usage as more people found out about the service and began using it. More organizations also began sharing their fax lists. However the real growth happened in the summer of that year when Gary contacted Cathy Crowe
, a Toronto street nurse who was organizing a campaign against photo-ids on health cards. This evolved into a relationship with the [Metro Network for Social Justice] (MNSJ) who turned their faxing and distribution over to FaxLeft. This required adding a second telephone line and a second computer.
In 1995 Dale was able to expand the service once more by taking on the Labour Council of Metropolitan Toronto & York Region's faxing. At this point, a third telephone line was needed so he requested assistance from the Labour Council and the MMSJ. who agreed to cover the costs of the extra lines.
FaxLeft also went online in 1995, with both a web site and an email address for receiving documents to be faxed. The web site included a calendar of events based on the faxes received. After February 19, 1998 Dale was no longer able to keep the site updated. A final version of the site was created later in 1999 to announce the closing of the service.
Additionally Dale created the FaxLeft Guide to Friendly Faxing to help people design documents.
FaxLeft also developed an e-mail distribution which allowed customers to directly control which faxes they printed.
The service was so successful that the idea was adopted in a number of other centres around Ontario. While a list of all the locations was never attempted, similar services were set up in Kitchener/Waterloo, Kingston and the Niagara region.
The number of similar services also increased after Dale appeared on Barrie Zwicker
's Skylight program on Vision TV to talk about FaxLeft and fax networks.
By 1997 almost all the labour, social justice and environmental groups were using FaxLeft and most had provided their own fax tree numbers to be merged with Faxleft's. Other groups in the arts, community and faith fields were also using FaxLeft. With such a diverse range of interests, Dale had to spend a considerable amount of time managing distribution lists to allow customers to specify which areas of concern they wanted to receive faxes on.
By 1999 the workload became too much since Dale also had a day job. In February 1999 he notified the major stakeholders, the Labour Council and the Metro Network for Social Justice, that it was time to develop an alternative. FaxLeft needed office space where one or more volunteers could take over managing the system, with Dale helping with the technical issues. Unfortunately they were unable to come up with a viable alternative so FaxLeft sent out its last faxes on August 31, 1999.
The web site shut down on October 20 of that year and FaxLeft faded into history. However the service was so popular that Dale continued to receive calls about it for a full decade after it ceased operation.
Lite.
However, even with the limited number of faxes coming in, it quickly became clear that Dale needed a permanent method of sending and receiving faxes. He sold his laptop computer and bought a Pentium 60 desktop system. He also upgraded from WinFax
Lite to the latest release of the full version which had better list control. This new setup allowed him to send and receive faxes 24x7.
In order to accommodate the increased volume when he took over the MNSJ fax list, Dale converted his Pentium 60 desktop into a server running Windows NT v3.51 and acquired a new Pentium 133 desktop computer. By adding a second telephone line, he was actually able to triple the number of faxes sent out, since one line could broadcast continuously while the second line received faxes during the day and broadcast overnight.
Running a third line posed a technical challenge however. At the time, the affordable fax software could only control a single modem each. Initially Dale got around this by running two different fax programs on his server. However, this was awkward since they used different lists and fax formats.
Eventually Dale became involved in Delrina's beta program for WinFax 4, which could handle two telephone lines per computer. However, whereas earlier versions of WinFax used the well-documented DBF file format (used by the popular dBASE program), the new version used a proprietary format and couldn't export its lists. This created difficulties later when Dale shut down FaxLeft..
In 1996 Dale added a fourth telephone line to keep up with the demand. This was covered by the Ontario Federation of Labour
. He also continued to upgrade his hardware and software, switching to newer versions of WinFax as they became available. The release of Talkworks as a voice-capable successor to WinFax allowed Dale to handle all incoming calls with his computer, leading to more reliable fax reception .
Eventually his server became a Pentium 200 MHz machine running Windows NT4 while his desktop eventually ran on an AMD 450 MHz processor and used Windows 95
and Windows 98
as they became available.
His primary method of preparing faxes was to use Corel's Photopaint program that came with CorelDraw
. Because fax transmission times depend on the number of changes within a scan line, it was critical to clean up the faxes as much as possible. Photopaint would be used to straighten the faxes, remove any header lines and erase noise from the background. It frequently was also necessary to increase the contrast and touch up characters so the outbound faxes would be legible.
In almost all cases the faxes that were sent out looked better than the ones that came in. Faxes that were received via e-mail would often look almost as good as if they had been directly printed to a laser printer. The high quality of the faxes as received was generally greatly appreciated. It allowed them to easily be duplicate for local distribution or posting, something that was more of a problem with traditional faxing were the quality dropped off sharply with each generation from the original.
When FaxLeft was shut down in 1999, various groups requested fax lists so they could continue sending to their groups. Unfortunately, because WinFax/Talkworks used a closed data format for its databases, Dale was unable to fully extract the actual lists he was faxing to. The best he was able to accomplish was to provide the raw directory.
Bob Rae
Robert Keith "Bob" Rae, PC, OC, OOnt, QC, MP is a Canadian politician. He is the Member of Parliament for Toronto Centre and interim leader of the Liberal Party of Canada....
in the spring of 1993.
At the time fax machines were the most common form of reaching a targeted audience. E-mail was becoming common but almost always as corporate systems that couldn't esily send or receive e-mail to outside groups. Most organizations had at least one fax machine and many individuals also had fax machines at home.
Fax modems were also readily available and almost always came with fax software. Gary Dale
Gary Dale
Gary Dale was born in Fort St. John, British Columbia, Canada, on October 1, 1952. He spent the first nine years living in a small Rocky Mountain village called Trutch, mainly identifiable by its mile number on the Alaska Highway...
, then President of OPSEU Local 508, was one of the early members of the UCAC and was also a systems analyst. When the subject of fax distribution came up, he immediately recognized the advantages of using a computer with a fax modem. Fortunately he already had both.
And so FaxLeft began. Members of UCAC would fax him their flyers and he would send them out. Since Dale was doing this from his home, the faxes were sent out overnight using his home telephone line so that he could still receive calls in the evening.
The initial fax list was populated from lists provided by UCAC members. These had to be manually entered into WinFax before they could be used. The initial list was only about 100 numbers and there were few faxes.
Through 1994 FaxLeft went through a steady growth in usage as more people found out about the service and began using it. More organizations also began sharing their fax lists. However the real growth happened in the summer of that year when Gary contacted Cathy Crowe
Cathy Crowe
Cathy Crowe, RN is a Canadian nurse, educator and social activist, specializing in advocacy for the homeless in Canada. She was the Ontario New Democratic Party's candidate in the 2010 provincial by-election and in the 2011 provincial election in Toronto Centre.-Early life and education:Raised in...
, a Toronto street nurse who was organizing a campaign against photo-ids on health cards. This evolved into a relationship with the [Metro Network for Social Justice] (MNSJ) who turned their faxing and distribution over to FaxLeft. This required adding a second telephone line and a second computer.
In 1995 Dale was able to expand the service once more by taking on the Labour Council of Metropolitan Toronto & York Region's faxing. At this point, a third telephone line was needed so he requested assistance from the Labour Council and the MMSJ. who agreed to cover the costs of the extra lines.
FaxLeft also went online in 1995, with both a web site and an email address for receiving documents to be faxed. The web site included a calendar of events based on the faxes received. After February 19, 1998 Dale was no longer able to keep the site updated. A final version of the site was created later in 1999 to announce the closing of the service.
Additionally Dale created the FaxLeft Guide to Friendly Faxing to help people design documents.
FaxLeft also developed an e-mail distribution which allowed customers to directly control which faxes they printed.
The service was so successful that the idea was adopted in a number of other centres around Ontario. While a list of all the locations was never attempted, similar services were set up in Kitchener/Waterloo, Kingston and the Niagara region.
The number of similar services also increased after Dale appeared on Barrie Zwicker
Barrie Zwicker
Barrie Wallace Zwicker is a Canadian alternative media journalist, documentary producer, and political activist. He is most famous for his documentary work, which has dealt primarily with 9/11 conspiracy theories.-Biography:...
's Skylight program on Vision TV to talk about FaxLeft and fax networks.
By 1997 almost all the labour, social justice and environmental groups were using FaxLeft and most had provided their own fax tree numbers to be merged with Faxleft's. Other groups in the arts, community and faith fields were also using FaxLeft. With such a diverse range of interests, Dale had to spend a considerable amount of time managing distribution lists to allow customers to specify which areas of concern they wanted to receive faxes on.
By 1999 the workload became too much since Dale also had a day job. In February 1999 he notified the major stakeholders, the Labour Council and the Metro Network for Social Justice, that it was time to develop an alternative. FaxLeft needed office space where one or more volunteers could take over managing the system, with Dale helping with the technical issues. Unfortunately they were unable to come up with a viable alternative so FaxLeft sent out its last faxes on August 31, 1999.
The web site shut down on October 20 of that year and FaxLeft faded into history. However the service was so popular that Dale continued to receive calls about it for a full decade after it ceased operation.
Technical Description
Initially FaxLeft ran from an Ultinet i486 laptop computer running Windows for Workgroups v3.11 using a program called WinFaxWinFax
WinFax is a Microsoft Windows-based software product designed to let computers equipped with fax-modems to communicate directly to stand-alone fax machines, or other similarly equipped computers.-History:...
Lite.
However, even with the limited number of faxes coming in, it quickly became clear that Dale needed a permanent method of sending and receiving faxes. He sold his laptop computer and bought a Pentium 60 desktop system. He also upgraded from WinFax
WinFax
WinFax is a Microsoft Windows-based software product designed to let computers equipped with fax-modems to communicate directly to stand-alone fax machines, or other similarly equipped computers.-History:...
Lite to the latest release of the full version which had better list control. This new setup allowed him to send and receive faxes 24x7.
In order to accommodate the increased volume when he took over the MNSJ fax list, Dale converted his Pentium 60 desktop into a server running Windows NT v3.51 and acquired a new Pentium 133 desktop computer. By adding a second telephone line, he was actually able to triple the number of faxes sent out, since one line could broadcast continuously while the second line received faxes during the day and broadcast overnight.
Running a third line posed a technical challenge however. At the time, the affordable fax software could only control a single modem each. Initially Dale got around this by running two different fax programs on his server. However, this was awkward since they used different lists and fax formats.
Eventually Dale became involved in Delrina's beta program for WinFax 4, which could handle two telephone lines per computer. However, whereas earlier versions of WinFax used the well-documented DBF file format (used by the popular dBASE program), the new version used a proprietary format and couldn't export its lists. This created difficulties later when Dale shut down FaxLeft..
In 1996 Dale added a fourth telephone line to keep up with the demand. This was covered by the Ontario Federation of Labour
Ontario Federation of Labour
The Ontario Federation of Labour is a prominent federation of labour unions in the Canadian province of Ontario. The original OFL was established by the Canadian Congress of Labour in 1944...
. He also continued to upgrade his hardware and software, switching to newer versions of WinFax as they became available. The release of Talkworks as a voice-capable successor to WinFax allowed Dale to handle all incoming calls with his computer, leading to more reliable fax reception .
Eventually his server became a Pentium 200 MHz machine running Windows NT4 while his desktop eventually ran on an AMD 450 MHz processor and used Windows 95
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented graphical user interface-based operating system. It was released on August 24, 1995 by Microsoft, and was a significant progression from the company's previous Windows products...
and Windows 98
Windows 98
Windows 98 is a graphical operating system by Microsoft. It is the second major release in the Windows 9x line of operating systems. It was released to manufacturing on 15 May 1998 and to retail on 25 June 1998. Windows 98 is the successor to Windows 95. Like its predecessor, it is a hybrid...
as they became available.
His primary method of preparing faxes was to use Corel's Photopaint program that came with CorelDraw
CorelDRAW
CorelDRAW is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Corel Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. It is also the name of Corel's Graphics Suite...
. Because fax transmission times depend on the number of changes within a scan line, it was critical to clean up the faxes as much as possible. Photopaint would be used to straighten the faxes, remove any header lines and erase noise from the background. It frequently was also necessary to increase the contrast and touch up characters so the outbound faxes would be legible.
In almost all cases the faxes that were sent out looked better than the ones that came in. Faxes that were received via e-mail would often look almost as good as if they had been directly printed to a laser printer. The high quality of the faxes as received was generally greatly appreciated. It allowed them to easily be duplicate for local distribution or posting, something that was more of a problem with traditional faxing were the quality dropped off sharply with each generation from the original.
When FaxLeft was shut down in 1999, various groups requested fax lists so they could continue sending to their groups. Unfortunately, because WinFax/Talkworks used a closed data format for its databases, Dale was unable to fully extract the actual lists he was faxing to. The best he was able to accomplish was to provide the raw directory.