JargonFile/entries/Foonly.txt

Foonly

n. 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.