Context date July 2008 Original research date July 2008 Foonly was the computer company formed by Dave Poole , who was one of the principal Super Foonly designers as well as one of Hacker programmer subculture hacker dom s more colorful personalities. 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 Digital Equipment Corporation DEC timesharing ... was the ARPANET standard. 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 ... I had the usual grandiose plans requiring bigger and better computers. The three foonly principals ..., and a port of tops 10 to run on foonly itself and spent many fine hours with Poole, deducing I Box ... 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 F2,3,4 ... little foonly models were built from 2901 bitslices, based on a design originally intended to be the F1 ... 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 first Foonly machine, the F 1, was the computational ... ever built, with a clock rate of 90 100 ns per cycle, but only one was ever made. Foonly Inc. did not acquire ..., Foonly s proposal to build another F 1 was eclipsed by the Mars computer , and the company never quite recovered. Added by Phil Petit, one of the above mentioned Foonly designers quote The word foonly ... to use the name Foonly for, so we did. Many elements of our original Stanford design were incorporated ... Added by Dan Martin Principal Engineer for Tymshare Inc. quote Tymshare sold the Foonly F4 to the Airforce ... http bitsavers.org pdf foonlyFoonly documentation at bitsavers.org External links http pdp10.nocrew.org ... more details
Systems Concepts now the SC Group is a company co founded by Stewart Nelson hacker Stewart Nelson and Mike Levitt focused on making computer hardware hardware products related to the Digital Equipment Corporation DEC PDP 10 series of computer s. One of its major products was the SA 10, an interface which allowed PDP 10s to be connected to disk storage disk and tape drive tape drives designed for use with the channel interfaces of IBM mainframe s. Later, Systems Concepts attempted to produce a compatible replacement for the DEC PDP 10 computers. Mars was the code name for a family of PDP 10 compatible computers built by Systems Concepts, including the initial SC 30M, the smaller SC 25, and the slower SC 20. These machines were marvels of engineering design although not much slower than the unique Foonly F 1, they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC KS10 or Foonly F 2, F 3, or F 4 machines. They were also completely compatible with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries including the operating system with no modifications at about 2 3 times faster than a KL10. When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts hoped to sell their machine to customers with a software investment in PDP 10s. Their spring 1984 announcement generated excitement in the PDP 10 world. TOPS 10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS 20 by early fall. However, people at Systems Concepts were better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them the company continually improved the design, but lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced believing they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8000 VAX 8600 and not startups such as Sun Microsystems building workstations with comparable power at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC 30M to Stanford University in late 1985, most customers had already abandoned the PDP 10, usually for OpenVMS VMS or Unix systems. Neverth ... more details
Digital Productions was a computer animation company in Los Angeles, California , that produced advertisements and special effects for films in the 1980s. The company was founded by John Whitney, Jr. and Gary Demos in 1982, following their departure from Information International, Inc. Triple I . They received financial support from Control Data Corporation . Whitney and Demos felt that greater computer power was needed to produce effects such as those being made by Triple I for Tron Digital Productions became famous for using a Cray X MP supercomputer to render their animations. Digital Productions created 27 minutes of animation, in 300 scenes, for the film The Last Starfighter . ref name OHS http design.osu.edu carlson history lesson6.html dp Ohio State University CG history page ref Each frame of the animation contained an average of 250,000 polygon computer graphics polygon s, and had a resolution of 3000 x 5000 36 bit pixel s they claimed that the imagery was 50 times more complex than the graphics in previous feature films. They estimated that using computer animation required only half the time, and one half to one third the cost, that would have been required if then traditional methods had been used. Other work done by the company includes effects for Labyrinth film Labyrinth , 2010 film 2010 , and Mick Jagger s Hard Woman music video. In 1986, Digital Productions was bought out by Omnibus Computer Graphics , who also took over Robert Abel and Associates and purchased Triple I s Foonly computer. Notes reflist References cite journal title About the Cover journal IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications author Maxine Brown month July year 1984 pages 7 8 cite web url http accad.osu.edu waynec history tree dp.html title Digital Productions author Wayne Carlson accessdate 2006 06 30 Category Computer animation Category Visual effects companies compu graphics stub ... more details
. WAITS also ran on Foonly systems at CCRMA and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory LLL . The SAIL ... Microsystems as well as smaller companies such as Vicarm Inc. acquired by Unimation , Foonly , Imagen ... more details
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