Dacom

Dacom, Inc. was a technology company founded in 1966 by two former Lockheed engineers, Daniel Hochman and Don Weber."Fax: The Principles and Practice of Facsimile Communication, Daniel M. Costigan, Chilton Book Company, 1971, Page 239. See also Hochman and Weber's formal presentation of the digital fax at the 1970  IEEE International Conference on Communications, which is cited  in the professional literature discussing the origins of digital facsimile:  "Dacom Facsimile Data Compression Techniques",   Daniel Hochman and Donald Weber, IEEE ICC70  Proceedings of the International Conference on Communications, San Francisco, June pp. 20.14-20.21." They used their earlier research on sending digital images through satellites to develop new communication tools.Fax, Specs and Projections, IEEE Spectrum, 9/1974 pp. 77-88. Summary table of comparative fax specs in 1974 also cited in Telecommunications Media for the Delivery of Educational Programming, Richard Ballard and Lester F. Eastwood, Washington University Center for Technology November 1974The theoretical foundations are articulated in papers published in the early 1960s. See for example "Adaptive Telemetry and Data Compression", Daniel Hochman and Don R. Weber,  Aerospace Telemetry, Vol.II, Prentice Hall, 1966.

Their work led to the first digital fax machine sold to the public and later to a system that could send a fax in under one minute using a regular phone line. In 1973, Dacom won the IR-100 Award (now called the R&D 100 Award)Industrial Research Magazine, 1973 IR New Product Annual Industrial Research Magazine, 1973 IR New Product Annual, p.34 and database of previous R&D-100 winners for creating one of the year’s best new inventions in information technology. The ideas and patents from Dacom became the basis for the modern fax machine used in offices and homes.

 References