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Comment by peteri | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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!

I used to hang out with a British guy who invested in the DiskFax product and was also the distributor for Singapore and the APAC region, in the early 90s. Was a flop, though he sold a few to media/ad agencies that needed a simple way to transfer Mac DTP files to their various offices. This was before the advent of email, and sending files via modem between computers was a chore.

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