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