Foonly

Foonly was a short-lived American computer company formed by Dave Poole, one of the principal Super Foonly designers as well as one of hackerdom's more colourful personalities. The company produced a series of DEC PDP-10 compatible computers, first the high-performance F-1, and later a series of smaller and less expensive designs. The first Foonly machine, the F-1, was the computational engine used to create some of the graphics in the 1982 film Tron.

The PDP-10 successor was to have been built by the Super Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) along with a new operating system. The intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing system which SAIL was then running to a new generation, bypassing TENEX – at that time the ARPANET standard. The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 architecture machine ever built, with a clock rate of 90-100 ns per cycle, but only one was ever made. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the new operating system was cut in 1974. The design for Foonly 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:

[Dave Poole, Phil Petit, and Jack Holloway came to Information International (Triple-I or III)] with a proposal to build an updated version of the original design (using ECL instead of TTL). I'm not quite sure how it came about - pretty crazy idea - but the connections between Triple-i and SAIL were deep and wide in those days. Triple-i was using PDP-10s for OCR, and for their groundbreaking movie group under Gary Demos and John Whitney, Jr. Triple-I had the usual grandiose plans requiring bigger and better computers. The three foonly principals spent about a year designing, constructing, and debugging the F-1. Poole was the mainstay, Petit was around quite a bit, and Holloway appeared only at crucial moments. My impression was that Triple-i paid the costs of construction and very little more - an incredible deal for Triple-i, considering that the F-1 actually worked. It would have been a very expensive boat anchor if it hadn't. I did a lot of work on the software - console computer program, a second version of the microcode assembler, and a port of TOPS-10 to run on foonly itself; and spent many fine hours with Poole, deducing I-Box bugs from errant program behavior. Shortly after the F-1 was operational, Triple-I and I parted ways and I mostly lost track of the F-1. Triple-i got out of the movie biz; the Foonly ended up following Gary Demos to several other early digital effects companies.

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