Windows Fax and Scan
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On the other hand, all of this weight has to go somewhere and that’s a pretty large part of why even fresh Windows installs have such a significant footprint. It might not be obvious on a typical desktop PC, but on many low-end tablets and laptops, it can eat a large amount of the already-restrictive storage space. I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this is a part of why Windows struggles to maintain popularity in the tablet space outside of the Surface line, and the Surfaces aren’t exactly entry-level.
I think it’s fine for things like this to be optional - given that fax isn’t widely used in a lot of the world, it seems like a strange thing to install by default.
Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) was just an app on top of XP/Vista/7 (though unchanged in 7, and then killed), but was is still so loved by those who use it that they figured out how to extract it from Win7 and install it on Win10.
It was honestly the best media center experience I've ever used on a PC (Tivo might be better in hardware, but never had one and it puts ever other setup box from a cable company to shame). It's simply a shame that it wasn't used by enough users that microsoft stopped developing it and effectively killed it.
That's why so much of the media control efforts got pushed to Xbox because at least with the Xbox they could control more of the hardware directly. (Then those efforts were sabotaged in the early days of the Xbox One by bad press, which was a terrible shame because they had a lot of great ideas half-executed.)
Land lines were still almost universal, even though they have always been somewhat expensive. The Bell telephone monopoly was required to subsidize residential lines by charging higher prices for business customers.
Broadband internet was still uncommon and dial-up was still spreading fast. By 2001 most Windows PCs had built-in phone modems easily sending and recieving faxes as files over any convenient land line wall jack without need for a fax machine, using the Windows XP Faxing & Scanning routine not much differently than back under W9x, when laptops were much more rare and usually needed peripheral modems.
A scanner was only needed for faxing pieces of paper which you did not have in a printable Windows file format, and a Windows printer was only needed when you wanted pieces of paper from the fax files you received.
Printing apps, like Word, Excel, or Acrobat could select Windows fax output as if it was a printer and it would call your target phone number and print on their machine, retrying if the line was busy, and recalling at intervals if needed. Regardless if the target fax number had a real fax machine connected or another PC modem set for fax-receive mode.
Of course all of this was available for DOS before Windows became popular, using third party software, it's just the kind of thing office people wouldn't want to do without if the electronics is the least bit capable.
And the real smartphones, which were already disappearing before the arrival of iPhones and other touchscreen models, had built-in analog phone modems. When you connected the phone to your laptop using IR, USB or the later Bluetooth, then Windows drivers were installed including a virtual COM port. The modem in the phone would then connect to the PC COM port and behave similar to the first external phone modems, as the modems were designed to interace the COM port on the back of an IBM PC or mainframe to an ordinary telephone line.
Before cellular carriers offered a data plan you could still dial-up to AOL and get on the web to browse or email, or directly call or receive calls from fax machines. Anywhere you had cellular service and battery power.
As for Gravis, I would hope the old DOS drivers for Gravis joysticks of the '80's are still there in Windows for when you plug in a soundcard having an analog joystick/midi port. Naturally this had some of the most useful settings for non-Gravis joysticks . . .
[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-scan/9wzdncrfj3pv (from Windows 8 and still downloadable for Windows 10)
That said, I recently decided to look into the fax machine protocol because there's a surprisingly large amount of legacy use in Japan and it seems like there's a good market to replace it with an app. You wouldn't even need to use VoIP because the hardware literally has a phone connection. In my research I found an early stack overflow thread from the 2010s where I learned that the thing protecting the fax industry is a ton of obtuse standards that require payment to access. What little documentation I did find came from an obscure public information server on the ITU website. Apparently there are 3 generations of protocol. The first generation worked like scan lines in a television except the carrier frequency was audible and it was very slow scan (a few min per frame/page). The later revisions were digital in nature and from what I understood they compress the scan into continuous regions of white and dark. The exact compression scheme was very obtuse so that's where I gave up. I also could not figure out the handshake part of the protocol which happens when the call first connects. Good luck to anyone who wants to pick up where I left off.