
FISK – It's a floppy disk fax machine - pentestercrab
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1050258171317510144
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peteri
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 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.

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foone
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 ?

~~~
peteri
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.

~~~
foone
Very 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!

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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.

~~~
boomlinde
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.

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kazinator
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.

~~~
boomlinde
Apparently they initially intended for it to have a fast parallel connection
which would have meant a huge gain in speed, but they ended up with a serial
bus on the C64 to be compatible with VIC-20 disk drives. This was supposed to
be offset by hardware that could maintain a high serial speed, but the design
ended up half broken, which they had to amend with the slow software routines
before release.

It sucks, but it's nice that the computer could patch the disk drive at run-
time and have it run some more sophisticated software for a speed boost. For
example, the Action Replay 6 comes with a "fast loader" that performs some 18
times better than the kernal loader and stock 1541 firmware on normal CBM
formatted disks. Still not as quick as Woz' Disk II...

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kozak
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 widely available layman tool.

~~~
ihm
There's [https://file.pizza](https://file.pizza) which uses WebRTC for an easy
to use peer-to-peer transfer service.

~~~
cdoxsey
I love file.pizza (and its friends) but they're not great for large files. It
has to buffer the whole thing in memory.

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kodablah
Is this a project limitation or a tech limitation? I am familiar w/ browser
efforts to impl web streams, I wonder if that would help.

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ClassyJacket
I 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.

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Jaruzel
Re-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.

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tomcam
Or you could just email stuff

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ccozan
yes, 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? :)

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kristopolous
Here'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.

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DonaldFisk
Never heard of it.

There are three patents:
[https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Fisk+Communications+Inc](https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Fisk+Communications+Inc)

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nategri
Shout 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.

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gandalfian
I'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
You'd also need satellite spectrum, which is not cheap and easy to get.
There's no unlicensed satellite band.

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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.

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Jaruzel
In 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.

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tomjen3
It 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"...

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GNOMES
I would love to see this on an LGR Oddware episode...

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foone
A 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.

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drelihan
How else do you think the U.S. Nuclear System shares data
[https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/05/26/479588478...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2016/05/26/479588478/report-u-s-nuclear-system-relies-on-outdated-
technology-such-as-floppy-disks)?

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drelihan
... actually the U.S. Nuclear System uses 8 inch floppy disks. FISK seems to
be too advanced.

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protomyth
well, 5 1/4" floppies were a serious let down after using 8" floppies.

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tommywiseausmom
I'd pay money to see you smash it with a crowbar.

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SmellyGeekBoy
What would that achieve?

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

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foone
Sorry. 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.

~~~
Jaruzel
Don't apologise. Stick with what works for you. Sharing the fun is the most
important part, regardless of your choice of platform.

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anon49124
_Don '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)

