Information AboutFoonly |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT FOONLY | |
| dec hardware | |
| defunct computer companies of the united states | |
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The PDP-10 successor 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 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. 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 movie ''" Tron "''. The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made. Foonly Inc. didn't 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 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. Added by Phil Petit, (one of the above-mentioned Foonly designers): The word foonly appeared one day as I was debugging my assembler, and typing in random nonsense to test the "ASCII" pseudo op. The word hung around, and got attached to one small project or another from time to time, until the project to build a new PDP-10 compatible machine came along. That seemed like a good thing to use the name Foonly for, so we did. The statement above, "Most of the design team went to DEC ..." is just not true, at least as applied to the Foonly project. None of the three designers went to DEC. However, many elements of our original Stanford design were incorporated into the KL-10 by DEC, with the permission of Stanford. In particular, almost the whole M-box (the memory interface and cache) was incorporated unchanged, except to replace TTL with ECL. May 9, 2007 REFERENCES
EXTERNAL LINKS Some of those nameless persons from the Stanford A.I. lab that contributed in the foonly designed were: Baumgard, Gafford, Hellewell, E. McGuire, "Tovar". E. Mcgure did a major design called the "E-box" later used by DEC. There are many untold stories still...... |
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