History of Digital Sender

I was recently going through the various reviews that people had written about the Digital Sender. And I was amazed to see people from highly technical background calling it the Invention of the Century. I specially remember a university professor praising this device for its usefulness.

According to him the university staff, which was earlier entangled into paper, were now simply emailing teaching material to students at the click of a button. Before reading this I had never realized the importance of the digital sender in our workplace. But soon I realized how we had traveled from reducing the amount of paper we must have used earlier. And this actually is the basic history of the digital sender. In the middle of 1990s, when people realized that paper was almost everywhere, an alternative was eagerly awaited.

The factors that developed the need of a digital sending device include:

1. Paper Cost: With excessive demand in the industry and at research the cost of paper was seeing a rise. And the volume of paper that was used to distribute information was huge. This made the cost of paper a major issue.

2. Storage and disposal: Another important concern when using paper is that it has to be stored and disposed off. So, in a way the digital sender helps keep a cleaner environment and more ordered document management.

3. Distribution: This was the obvious need. At that time to distribute a document one had to either print many copies of it and send it physically or first get it scanned, then convert it into proper format and then send it across. However with the digital sender in place this job has become so easy that anyone can carry it out.

HP came with the first fully functional digital sender in the form of the 9100 on 21st September 1998. This is still very popular and is a great piece of technology. It used a very superior technology to gather information from various documents, converted it into pdf’s and send them across to as many users as you wanted. The job of scanning, arranging and managing the documents was now very simple and the amount of errors that were possible earlier was minimized as well. The digital sender works on the token passing network technology which has been working quite well so far to transfer the files over the network.

But very recently there have been talks about a shift in this technology. Newer technology has been coming into picture which would probably replace the existing technology and the file transfer faster. Digital senders not only send files to the email client using the SMTP gateway but also have the capability to send the files to a fax machine or a printer. The fax and the printing are also done via the network. 9100 comes with many variants like the 9100c and the 9100i. All of these have the same basic features but with some small enhancements.

Of these the 9100c is the most popular nowadays. Very recently a never version of the digital sender, the 9200, has been launched. A major improvement in the 9200 version apart from others is the ease of its usability. This model is comparatively easier to use. Digital Sender is truly a remarkable invention and it makes sense to use it properly to get the best utilization of time and resources.