In my scientific business in the 1990's I would select my fax machine according to the maximum length of paper it would send & receive. IIRC the best was about

In my scientific business in the 1990's I would select my fax machine according to the maximum length of paper it would send & receive. IIRC the best was about 8.5 x 39 inches or about a meter length of A4 width paper. We still had research instruments using similar thermal paper rolls themselves which plotted real-time data and that could be a few feet of paper if you were printing for more than an hour or so. Clients loved it when I could fax the whole thing, even if their poor fax machine broke it up into smaller pages. Then about the time of W9x I would fax it from the fax machine to a PC's analog modem to get it into a single Windows file using the Windows faxing routine. Interestingly, in the cargo business we had them much earlier when they were still called telecopiers. You would generally have a dedicated operator at each end (of the world, one of which was always likely to be called out after-hours for the "emergency" paperwork transmission) for the duration of the not-fully-reliable 300 baud session. Once the technology became a bit more user-friendly then attorneys began to wish they could use it but since the legal paperwork itself physically was not actually issued by their office it was no go. Our clients pay well for expedited paperwork and agreed in advance to accept it. Once the attorneys got the name changed from telecopier to "facsimile" machine they were fine after that.