Foonly
Encyclopedia
Foonly was the computer
company formed by Dave Poole, who was one of the principal Super Foonly designers as well as one of hackerdom's more colorful personalities.
The PDP-10
successor was to have been built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) along with a new operating system
. 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. The design for Foonly contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10.
The following few paragraphs are a personal account of the events, by Dave Dyer:
The first Foonly machine, the F-1, was the computational engine used to create some of the graphics in the film Tron
. The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, with a clock rate of 90-100 ns per cycle, but only one was ever made.
Foonly Inc. did not acquire any financial resources as a result of building the F-1, and the company's smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines ran not the popular TOPS-20
but another 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 of the Jupiter project cancellation in 1983, Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was eclipsed by the Mars computer, and the company never quite recovered.
Added by Phil Petit, (one of the above-mentioned Foonly designers):
Added by Dan Martin - Principal Engineer for Tymshare Inc.
The main application for Tymshare's version of the F4 was a version of Doug Englebart's NLS system, developed when his team moved to Tymshare from SRI, called "Augment". The machine, called the 26KL, was marketed as the "Augment Engine" when running Augment.
Computer
A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...
company formed by Dave Poole, who was one of the principal Super Foonly designers as well as one of hackerdom's more colorful personalities.
The PDP-10
PDP-10
The PDP-10 was a mainframe computer family manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation from the late 1960s on; the name stands for "Programmed Data Processor model 10". The first model was delivered in 1966...
successor was to have been built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) along with a new operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
. The intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...
timesharing system SAIL was then running to a new generation, bypassing TENEX which at that time was the ARPANET
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...
standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the new operating system was cut in 1974. The design for Foonly contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10.
The following few paragraphs are a personal account of the events, by Dave Dyer:
The first Foonly machine, the F-1, was the computational engine used to create some of the graphics in the film Tron
Tron
-Film:*Tron , a franchise that began in 1982 with the Walt Disney Pictures film Tron** Tron , a 1982 science fiction film by Disney, starring Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan, Dan Shor and David Warner...
. The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, with a clock rate of 90-100 ns per cycle, but only one was ever made.
Foonly Inc. did not acquire any financial resources as a result of building the F-1, and the company's smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines ran not the popular TOPS-20
TOPS-20
The TOPS-20 operating system by Digital Equipment Corporation was the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. TOPS-20 began in 1969 as the TENEX operating system of Bolt, Beranek and Newman...
but another 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 of the Jupiter project cancellation in 1983, Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was eclipsed by the Mars computer, and the company never quite recovered.
Added by Phil Petit, (one of the above-mentioned Foonly designers):
Added by Dan Martin - Principal Engineer for Tymshare Inc.
The main application for Tymshare's version of the F4 was a version of Doug Englebart's NLS system, developed when his team moved to Tymshare from SRI, called "Augment". The machine, called the 26KL, was marketed as the "Augment Engine" when running Augment.