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.<p>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)<p>One odd major use area was for sending disks with patterns for knitting machines around the world.<p>Oh and for those with a Sinclair fetish the case was designed by the Sinclair designer Rick Dickinson.
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.<p>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.
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.
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.<p>I'd love to see LGR or Techmoan do a video on this thing.
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.
Never heard of it.<p>There are three patents: <a href="https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Fisk+Communications+Inc" rel="nofollow">https://patents.google.com/?assignee=Fisk+Communications+Inc</a>
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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>They got this wrong.<p>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.<p>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.
How else do you think the U.S. Nuclear System shares data <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478/report-u-s-nuclear-system-relies-on-outdated-technology-such-as-floppy-disks" rel="nofollow">https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/26/479588478...</a>?
<i>Don't copy that floppy</i><p>With its very own horrible rap video with Flight Simulator in the background.<p><a href="https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/up863eQKGUI</a>