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 intention was to
leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system SAIL was 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 they 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 of the Jupiter project cancellation 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.
