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
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. 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 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. See the Mars entry
for the continuation and moral of this story.
![[prev]](../gif/left.gif){kind=small}
![[up]](../gif/up.gif){kind=small}
![[next]](../gif/right.gif){kind=small}