Dacom

Dacom, Inc. was founded in 1966 by two ex-Lockheed engineers, Daniel Hochman, President, and Don Weber, Vice President, building on their pioneering work on digital image compression invented for satellite communications. Their work resulted in the first commercial digital fax machine and later the first sub-minute facsimile transmission over a single standard phone line. In 1973 Dacom was recipient of the IR-100 Award (the name was later changed to the R&D 100 Awards) for the most significant new product in Information Technology. The patents and technology developed by Dacom have become the foundation of the modern desktop fax machine.

History

From the late 1950s Daniel Hochman, a pioneer in digital electronics, was head of a division of Lockheed Missiles & Space Company in Sunnyvale, California. In 1959 Hochman's team at Lockheed unveiled a 9-pound miniature television system that could transmit pictures from as far as 1000 miles in space, and in the early 1960s was working to develop a high-speed communications system for the transmission of images from space. The team faced two related problems: the density of data of a high-resolution photograph, and the low-power, low-capacity transmitters on board satellites. To address these problems, Hochman brought in Donald Weber to work on the problem of data compression - to achieve a higher rate of data transmitted with the same low-power equipment.