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 DEC's "Jupiter Project" followon to the PDP-10 was
cancelled 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.
[glossary]
[Reference(s) to this entry by made by: {Mars}{PDP-10}]