How else do you think the U.S. Nuclear System shares data https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478...?
FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
41–50 of 66 posts
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#42How else do you think the U.S. Nuclear System shares data https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478... ?
... actually the U.S. Nuclear System uses 8 inch floppy disks. FISK seems to be too advanced.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#43In 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…
There's https://file.pizza which uses WebRTC for an easy to use peer-to-peer transfer service.
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Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#44I'm always surprised that cheap satellite text messaging has never become a thing. All these new cheaper satellites, you would think it would be the ideal low bandwidth application. But lower the prices and greater abundance never quite happened. Somewhere in a box I still have a 802.11b wifi router with a built in 33.6kb dial up modem, which was the perfect thing at the time.
You'd also need satellite spectrum, which is not cheap and easy to get. There's no unlicensed satellite band.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#45How else do you think the U.S. Nuclear System shares data https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478... ?
... actually the U.S. Nuclear System uses 8 inch floppy disks. FISK seems to be too advanced.
well, 5 1/4" floppies were a serious let down after using 8" floppies.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#46The "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…
"This disk drive is actually a whole PC" was basically Nintendo's entire Unique Selling Proposition for a long while.
Nintendo made consoles cheaply enough to make a profit, because they weren't designed to be powerful enough for the games that would be released at the end of the console's lifecycle, only the games that would be released near the beginning. But they managed to release games as if the console was more powerful anyway. It was basically because the cartridge was a black box, and could contain anything up-to-and-including its own replacement console. Early-in-lifecycle, game cartridges were just a board with plain ROM chips on it, containing instructions to run on the base hardware; but late-in-lifecycle cartridges included all sorts of other chips. (A game released late in the life of the SNES included a full ARM core, several times more powerful than the SNES's own CPU! Though it only used it to draw a few vector animations in a couple scenes of the game...)
The Famicom Disk System and 64DD were "just" cartridges as well, from their host-console's perspective. And I don't mean that there was a complex dance where the FDS/64DD were running a DOS on the host-console's CPU that sent disk commands back to the drive; that logic was all internal to the drive itself, running on their on-board CPUs. It went even deeper than a memory-mapped IO port or an drive-command wire protocol; the console just didn't direct the drive at all. Rather, the firmware executing on the drive detected when the console would want new data, and DMAed in the required data itself, so that, from the console's perspective, the data was just "there" to see. (A bit like the NES's memory-mapper chips, but for full ROM banks rather than little word-sized windows.)
The closest comparison I can think of to how those devices worked, would be to using one of those aux-to-tape adapters—from the tape reader's perspective, the right data is "just there" when it goes to read it, as if it was a regular tape. In this case, the right data was "just there" in response to bus reads of ROM parts of the memory-space on the cartridge port. These devices were, effectively, the original "flash carts."
This design paradigm has culminated in some pretty ridiculous things embedded into a Nintendo cartridge, actually. There is a Nintendo DS flash cart that embeds a full GBA-compatible CPU core within it. Since it's in the wrong port to deliver GBA games directly to the DS's own GBA-compatible CPU core, it just "brings its own" CPU to emulate them on instead.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#47This 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…
In Some places 'eFAX' is still a thing, where the staff members can email a PDF (or Word doc etc.) to @ and it gets sent out of the building as a FAX over POTS. For incoming FAXs, users register their email address against a phone number or extension, and get incoming faxes as PDFs in their inboxes. For regulatory compliance reasons these systems are still in place in large banks, insurance firms, and law firms.
Pretty much every business copier we've leased in the last 8 years allows you to fax a document that would be printed to the copier.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#48In 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…
There's https://file.pizza which uses WebRTC for an easy to use peer-to-peer transfer service.
I love file.pizza (and its friends) but they're not great for large files. It has to buffer the whole thing in memory.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#49The "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…
A fun bit of related trivia is that the 6502 in the Commodore 1541 disk drive is slightly faster than the 6510 in the PAL C64.
The 1541 had a whole 6502 embedded system in it??? TIL.
Yet it was so astonishingly slow, it was a laughing stock among junior high school kids.
Total garbage compared to the Apple II drives designed by Woz, which were just dumb hardware, combined with a logic state sequencer" on the circuit card and registers for step motor control.
Re: FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think OP means sending files to someone over the internet. Like, if I wanted to send you, a complete stranger, something over the internet, then the options we could use are very limited. There's pretty much nothing that works on p2p basis, I'd have to upload it to something like google drive or mega first. Edit: Ok, I read a bit more about the thing that you sent and it looks like it does actually fulfil that part…
1: Open your bittorrent client. 2: Select File>New, or "Create new torrent", or whatever. 3: Pick the desired source file. 4: Create the torrent (and open it and make sure the source file is in the destination folder if your client didn't do that on it's own (you want "download finished, seeding to 0 peers")). 5: Right click>copy magnet link, then paste into whereever. 6: Other person downloads the file just like wit…
Torrents are nice but often blocked or severely throttled in corp/university/cheap internet environments.