Foonly

1. The PDP-10 successor that was to have been built by the

Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial IntelligenceLaboratory along with a new operating system. The intention

was to leapfrog from the old DEC time-sharing 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

colourful 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 toward 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.

[Jargon File]