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FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

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Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#11

Post by foone »

peteri wrote: post #9

Many years ago I was involved in a product called DiskFax which was similar. Used a fax modem which gave 9600bps even over crappy links like satellite. I believe there is one in the NSA museum as we did a version where the serial link between the modem and UART was broken out to the back so an encryption unit could be plugged in (I seem to recall it was used to send details of PoWs during the Bosnian conflicts) One o…

oh, hello!

I've been looking for a DiskFax machine for a long while, in fact I think it was my searches for that that ended up finding this one (on ebay).

That was a few years before the FISK, right? (FISK was ~1993). What was it internally? Something like a 6502/Z80 ?

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#13

Post by tyingq »

kozak wrote: post #4

In 2018, transferring large files over the internet is still not exactly straightforward. Few years ago Skype was excellent for P2P transfers of very large files, but since then they removed this feature, and today Skype's file transfer limits are ridiculously low. Using Dropbox or Google Drive for that requires a pre-paid amount of cloud storage space: you can't really stream anything directly with any well-known wi…

Not p2p, and limited to 1GB files, but Firefox Send works well. You can also pair it with minio and self host it.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#14

Post by rataata_jr »

kozak wrote: post #4

In 2018, transferring large files over the internet is still not exactly straightforward. Few years ago Skype was excellent for P2P transfers of very large files, but since then they removed this feature, and today Skype's file transfer limits are ridiculously low. Using Dropbox or Google Drive for that requires a pre-paid amount of cloud storage space: you can't really stream anything directly with any well-known wi…

P2P... Torrent?

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#15

Post by Theodores »

This product seems to be more about sending a file to another FAX machine that accepts files, presumably so you didn't have to own a MODEM.

They got this wrong.

In the days when FAX was used for things like sending purchase orders, what was needed was a means of putting a file on a floppy, walking to the FAX machine, then sending off a 'PDF' from there, removing the need to print out the form first.

Faxes were still sent a decade ago for this type of task, however, in a big office you had just the one physical FAX machine rather than everyone having a MODEM at their desk. It would take a little while to get things printed and shoved through the FAX machine, saving to disk would have cut down on the paper and enabled clearer documents to be sent.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#16

Post by Infernal »

kylnew wrote: post #7
XVar wrote: post #6

Ah the "what should have been a blog post as a series of 50 tweets" format, not my favourite publishing mechanism.

Sometimes I write a blog then sit on it for ages and never actually publish it because writing a blog is such a grand ordeal. If this format helps people ‘just get it done’ then I’m for it.

Now I'm thinking of a word processor that accepts tweets as input and stitches them together into a more seamless blog post style document.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#18

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

The "oh look, this disk drive is actually a whole PC" aspect reminds me of the "Mr. Backup Z64" copier for Nintendo 64. It had a 386-class embedded PC running a ROM-based DOS system to operate the internal Zip drive. Since the Zip drive sat on a standard ATA interface being driven by DOS, it could be replaced with a hard drive or CompactFlash slot.

More loosely, it's also reminiscent of the Commodore disk drives that had their own 6502-class CPU and a software interface to upload code. Some developers used this to create "fast loaders" that bypass the slow stock communication routines.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#19

Post by peteri »

foone wrote: post #11
peteri wrote: post #9

Many years ago I was involved in a product called DiskFax which was similar. Used a fax modem which gave 9600bps even over crappy links like satellite. I believe there is one in the NSA museum as we did a version where the serial link between the modem and UART was broken out to the back so an encryption unit could be plugged in (I seem to recall it was used to send details of PoWs during the Bosnian conflicts) One o…

oh, hello! I've been looking for a DiskFax machine for a long while, in fact I think it was my searches for that that ended up finding this one (on ebay). That was a few years before the FISK, right? (FISK was ~1993). What was it internally? Something like a 6502/Z80 ?

8088 internally with a custom ASIC for the board support (no DMA). I think it launched in 1990.

Memory was 128K of Intel flash with 8K fixed boot partition and 64K of RAM.

Z8530 for the UART, Rockwell chipset for the fax portion. I seem to remember lots of messing around getting the parameters correct for the filters to detect dial tone for various european telco approvals. There was also a pass through port to allow plugging a fax machine in the back (can't remember how that worked though)

I can't remember what we used for the floppy disc controller (I seem to recall we supported single density floppies so we didn't use a multi-IO chip) and later models used a IDE drive with a 16->8 bit converter card.

Somewhere I probably still have the schematics.

Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine

#20

Post by 0x445442 »

davidcollantes wrote: post #17
XVar wrote: post #6

Ah the "what should have been a blog post as a series of 50 tweets" format, not my favourite publishing mechanism.

How about https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1050258171317510144.html ?

Terrific if you think in 280 character paragraphs.
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