Characters/Foonly

Description

Wearing a long robe, a rheumy-eyed albino ferret squints through a monocle made of polarized glass. While his movements are slow, as if pained by arthritis, and his fur is mangy and unkempt, he appears to be concealing an agility he might still have. When he walks, the tinkling of metal on metal can be heard, muffled from inside his robe. The wrinkles around his eyes and joints look less like the results of age and more the by-product of "extreme living". He leans on a staff that is a head taller than his 1.6 meters, crooked at the top; hanging on the inside of it is a ball -- no, several polygons joined together to make a ball, colored red and white alternately. Each wrist is clad in a handcuff, the chain once between them is broken and dangles freely. There's a house-arrest device fitted to his ankle, the red alarm light blinking away.

History

The Foonly (from "the error message "FOO NLI", or "FOO is Not a Logical Identifier") was a 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 intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC time-sharing 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.

The first F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly) was built by Dave Poole's company. It was the computational engine used to create the graphics in the movies "TRON", "Flight of the Navigator", "The Last Starfighter", "Explorers", and others. 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 toward 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.

Background

Foonly the ferret claims to actually be the F-1 computer, despite all evidence to the contrary. He offers nothing to support his claim.

Miscellaneous

Foonly has his own livejournal: http://www.livejournal.com/users/foonly . It contains no relevant information.