Foonly was the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the principal Super Foonly designers, and 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 along with a new operating system. (The name itself came from FOO NLI, an error message emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning "FOO is Not a Legal Identifier".) 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 PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for Programmed Data Processor model 10. It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many... The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (commonly called the Stanford AI Lab, or SAIL), was one of the leading centres for artificial intelligence research from the 1960s through the 1980s. ... An operating system is a special computer program that manages the relationship between application software, the wide variety of hardware that makes up a computer system, and the user of the system. ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC - the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 - preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). ... ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ...

The first Foonly machine 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 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. Tron has several meanings: a movie, see Tron (film) an arcade game based on the movie, see Tron (arcade game) a German hacker whose nickname was Tron, see Tron (hacker) a real-time operating system kernel, see TRON Project. ... Systems Concepts (now the SC Group) is a company focused on making hardware products related to the DEC PDP-10 series of computers. ...

This article is based on one from the jargon file. The jargon file is in the public domain. The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ... The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. ...

External links

• Lars Brinkman's table showing the F1 in perspective with other PDP-10 models