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FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine
- Jaruzel 8y agoRe-imagine this with USB ports instead of a floppy drive and internet instead of dial up, and you've got quite a cute data transfer device for very non technical people.
- tomcam 8y agoOr you could just email stuff
- ccozan 8y agoyes, but: - use LTE instead of line - encrypt the hell out of it - just create pairs only -> just got the most secure 2 peer communication device. Probably you can fit it on a usb stick with a slot for a SIM. Actually not a bad idea for a startup. Who's in? :)
- kristopolous 8y agoHere's who you reach out to for that, a startup working with Marvell doing a pre-standard 5G ISP service: https://starry.com https://starry.com I'm not affiliated with them, I just think it's a good match.
- kalleboo 8y agoEven Gmail has a measly 25 MB attachment limit
- ClassyJacket 8y agoI never thought of something like this existing but it seems obvious now and I'm surprised I haven't seen one before. The fact that PCs had these capabilities built in was I guess enough to kill it, but that didn't stop actual fax machines from clinging on to life for far too long - I suppose they had momentum. I'd love to see LGR or Techmoan do a video on this thing.
- kozak 8y agoIn 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 widely available layman tool.
- Asooka 8y agoThere are a couple that use webrtc for p2p transfers. The one I know and use is https://www.sharedrop.io/ https://www.sharedrop.io/ (needs javascript, obviously).
- madshiva 8y agotransfer file with Skype? are you kidding? You had plenty of free stream service... Skype is just a bloatware/malware.
- tyingq 8y agoNot p2p, and limited to 1GB files, but Firefox Send works well. You can also pair it with minio and self host it.
- rataata_jr 8y agoP2P... Torrent?
- kozak 8y agoNot a trivial layman's tool (and even less trivial to make private transfers secure enough).
- Luc 8y agoOnce it's set up https://syncthing.net/ https://syncthing.net/ works transparently. Just drop files into a designated folder and they'll magically appear on the corresponding folder on the other machine.
- XVar 8y agoAh the "what should have been a blog post as a series of 50 tweets" format, not my favourite publishing mechanism.
- kylnew 8y agoSometimes 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.
- Infernal 8y agoNow I'm thinking of a word processor that accepts tweets as input and stitches them together into a more seamless blog post style document.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kylnew 8y agoThere are definitely services that just do a basic stitching so that it reads like a giant paragraph but it would be neat to see it truely translate from a tweet thread to a blog format beyond just a basic concatenation
- foone 8y agoSorry. I've got ADHD, so that's really the only way I can usually do these things. I'm planning to videoify it in the future, if that's more your style.
- peteri 8y agoMany 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 odd major use area was for sending disks with patterns for knitting machines around the world. Oh and for those with a Sinclair fetish the case was designed by the Sinclair designer Rick Dickinson.
- foone 8y agooh, 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 ?
- peteri 8y ago8088 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.
- foone 8y agoVery neat! That sounds like it's pretty similar to this one then. I wonder if the FISK was directly inspired by the DiskFax? I'm hoping to get in touch with the designer so I may have some answers soon. I'd love to see those schematics if you can find them!
- Theodores 8y agoThis 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.
- Jaruzel 8y agoIn Some places 'eFAX' is still a thing, where the staff members can email a PDF (or Word doc etc.) to <number>@<faxmachine.local> 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.
- tomjen3 8y agoIt amuses me greatly to imagine companies sending e-mails to fax to a fax machine which sends them to a fax that then emails the recipient the "fax"...
- protomyth 8y agoPretty 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.
- 0xcde4c3db 8y agoThe "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.
- boomlinde 8y agoA 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.
- tyingq 8y agoThe 6502 in the later 1571 drive ran twice as fast as the C64's CPU.
- kazinator 8y agoThe 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.
- foone 8y agoThe drive itself was actually very powerful and capable, it just was very limited by having to talk to the C64 using the Vic20-compatible interface, which had issues. That's why there were so many products for the c64 to fix it: Epyx Fast Load cartridges, for example. And plenty of games worked by having you first load a very simple file that just installed faster disk IO code and then used that code to load the rest of the game. That's basically what Disk II drives did on the Apple II, just for EVERY (bootable) DISK instead of only some of them: The first bootloader is encoded in a simplified method so that they can save firmware space, but the first bootloader is just better disk IO routines to load the rest of the disk.
- DonaldFisk 8y agoNever heard of it. There are three patents: https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Fisk+Communications+Inc https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Fisk+Communications+Inc
- gandalfian 8y agoI'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.
- dboreham 8y agoYou'd also need satellite spectrum, which is not cheap and easy to get. There's no unlicensed satellite band.
- nategri 8y agoShout out to Foone in general. A+ twitter follow if you're into old and weird tech. They're quite talented at converting "wtf is this" into an enjoyable narrative.
- drelihan 8y agoHow else do you think the U.S. Nuclear System shares data https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478/report-u-s-nuclear-system-relies-on-outdated-technology-such-as-floppy-disks https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478...?
- tommywiseausmom 8y agoI'd pay money to see you smash it with a crowbar.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoWhat would that achieve?
- anon49124 8y agoDon't copy that floppy With its very own horrible rap video with Flight Simulator in the background. https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI
- GNOMES 8y agoI would love to see this on an LGR Oddware episode...
- foone 8y agoA few people have mentioned that! I'm keeping my eye out for a second one, so if I find one (or I figure out a way to talk to off-the-shelf hardware with this one) I'll send it his way and we can exchange disks.