Talk:Foonly

I must make a few corrections, since I was one of the people involved. The word "foonly" didn't have such a logical derivation as suggested above. I was debugging my assembler (at Stanford AI Lab) one day, and typing in random collections of letters, to test the "ASCII" pseudo-op, when, more or less by accident, the phrase "foo foo foonly is a bastard" popped out. The word hung around for years, until the computer-design project came along and needed a name. It is not quite correct to say that Dave Poole started the whole thing. He did begin the negotiations with III, but as far as the design and building went, he, Jack Holloway, and I, were equal partners and did equal amounts of work. Jack Holloway designed the E-box (the instruction-execution unit), Poole designed the I-Box (the instruction fetch and decode unit), and I did the M-box (the cache memory and main-memory interface) along with the I/O ports. The small foonlies were a somewhat pumped up version of the little machine I designed to be the console computer. The original console computer was constructed at III, and ran fine. As I recall, it ran a stripped-down version of Tenex, but I could be wrong about that. It was a very simple bit-slice design, with lots of microcoding to emulate the PDP-10 instruction set. It was not planned to be especially fast. I think it took me all of two weeks to design it.

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.

As I can't seem to figure out how to send a message to Jaysweet, or any of the other people who insist on undoing my corrections, I'm posting this note here, and elsewhere.

My name is Phil Petit (Note spelling, please). I was one of the three designers of Foonly. Surely I have the right to correct the spelling of my name. If you believe I do not have that right, please explain yourself.

Furthermore, several things in the original article were just plain wrong. For example, the ridiculous description of the origin of the name Foonly. It had nothing to do with an error message from the assembler. I ought to know, I wrote the assembler in question (it was called FAIL -- being something of a follow-on to an assembler for the PDP-1, written by Poole, and called PASS). So, I removed the incorrect explanation and added the correct one, in my note at the bottom.

Please leave my changes in place. They are correct. The older version is not correct.

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.

Foonly Inc carried on, building F2, F3, F4 and F5 in various quantities for people who wanted to own a PDP-10 but not to pay DEC's prices. The first few "little foonly" models were built from 2901 bit slice processors based on a design originally intended to be the F1's console computer. Alas, I don't think the F1 ever had a proper console - it always had some KA-10 attached. One of the first "little foonly" computers was sold to Symbolics for use as their original file server. Another customer was Tymshare Inc.

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.

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.

Tymshare sold the Foonly F4 to the Airforce for the Arpanet project. Several of the boards were converted to multi-wire process, and the console computer was replaced by an IBM PC running an application developed using Pascal. Interface boards were developed by myself that brought the total boot time from 15 mins to under 10 seconds. The old console computers were LISP derivatives that took forever to load. LISP was an artificial intelligence language that was not bad for a lab environment, but a nightmare for the market environment. I worked with Dave Poole for 4 years, and I have to admit he is very intelligent, was not a pleasant experience.

Dave Poole's first technical interface for selling the F2 to us at Tymshare, in the 1979-80 timeframe, was my manager Allen Ginzberg. We intended to use the converted F2, called the "F3", as a replacement for the very expensive to buy and maintain KL-10 systems. It was specifically conceived of to be a "MAGNUM engine", intended to run Tymshare's groundbreaking relational database system under the TYMCOM-X OS.

At first, it was my job to port the TYMCOM-X OS to the F3, a job which I had performed once before at Tymshare for the KI-10 to KL-10 port, and had also performed at DEC in Marlboro, Mass for TOPS-10 (after Tony Wachs was in a terrible car crash in his 240/Z). However, we needed the full KL-10/KI-10 instruction set, and Foonly had only implemented the KA-10's instructions.

Dave, sadly to say, "didn't suffer fools lightly" , and I was no exception, despite the fact that I was a customer.

However, when one of the Foonly engineers burned out trying to finish off the 2901 tape controller firmware, arithmetic trap instructions, high precision integer instructions, KL-10 style paging, and ADJBP (adjust byte pointer), he was at a standstill. Allen suggested to Dave that I try my hand at finished the microcode. Dave, faced with no alternatives, very reluctantly agreed.

I finished off the microcode successfully and brought the system up on Tymnet. I can't recall if we ever put it into timesharing service, but I believe we did. I left Tymshare not too long afterwards, so the rest of the history must be left for someone else to tell.

And yes, Dave and I became friends, and I was no longer a fool to be suffered - and yes, he did bring his parrot to work sometimes in his little VW bug!

The main application for Tymshare's version of the F4 was a version of Doug Englebart's NLS system, developed when his team moved to Tymshare from SRI, called "Augment". The machine, called the 26KL, was marketed as the "Augment Engine" when running Augment.

Paul Milleson was General Manager of Foonly Inc from: · March 1, 1981 to March 1, 1984

He was in charge of manufacturing the Foonly F2 - 5 computers from the ground up with direct control and involvement in every production process and even paid the bills. He interfaced with David Poole directly and was his primary contact with the outside world. SRI and Tymshare were the primary customers with a few machines at Stanford's CCRMA ( Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics ) Tymshare in Cupertino, though their focus was on selling business solutions, they seemed to be a front-runner in inadvertently starting an Internet-like commune of professional people. Many people stayed in communication with each other through their systems.

Key people involved with keeping Foonly going were: Phil Gossett, Jeff Peters, Gary Schwede, Bo Erros, Jean Inman, Bobby Huseman, Brad Bliss, Taylor White, Jimmie Tyler, Paul Beaver, Ken Titus, and Diane Matier.