1. Foonly
1. The PDP-10 successor that was to have been
built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory along with a new operating system. (The name itself came from
FOO NLI, an error message emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning
“FOO is Not a Legal Identifier”. The intention was to
leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system SAIL
was then running to a new generation, bypassing TENEX which at that time
was the ARPANET standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the
new operating system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to DEC
and contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10. 2. The name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the
principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more colorful
personalities. Many people remember the parrot which sat on Poole's
shoulder and was a regular companion. 3. Any of the machines built by Poole's company. The first was the
F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the computational engine used to
create the graphics in the movie TRON. The F-1 was
the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made. The effort
drained Foonly of its financial resources, and the company turned towards
building smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines. Unfortunately,
these ran not the popular TOPS-20 but a TENEX
variant called Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also, the
machines shipped were actually wire-wrapped engineering prototypes
requiring individual attention from more than usually competent site
personnel, and thus had significant reliability problems. Poole's
legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did not help
matters. By the time DEC's “Jupiter Project” followon to the
PDP-10 was cancelled in 1983, Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was
eclipsed by the Mars, and the company never quite
recovered. See the Mars entry for the continuation
and moral of this story.
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Definitions of Foonly
