The Foonly F1 Computer (2011) | Hacker News Reader

The Foonly F1 Computer (2011)

dave.zfxinc.net

42 pointsdcminter14 comments

I know some of the dramatis personae of this story, and even exchanged messages with one of them the other day. There are some funny believable episodes in that story.

I believe Symbolics (seemingly famous these days only for being the first domain name in the DNS) had an F2 because they couldn't afford a real PDP-10 and if you know what they thought of it its name was pos.symbolics.com (i.e. "piece of shit")

There's also some gibberish in the early part of the story. For example the first interactive vector graphics game was of course SPACEWAR, which I have played on the original hardware.

First .com, not first domain name ever.

Symbolics veteran here...

Ahh, fond memories.

Indeed, we had a Foonly. I don't know the model number, but it was a single rack unit. We used it as a server, software development, SUDS electrical CAD, etc.

And yes, it's name was "pos". That was never meant to be particularly nasty; more like an optimistic end-of-an-era kind of thing.

And I have to say, it was pretty reliable. I can't remember it ever dying.

At least two early Symbolics folks were involved with Foonly, so I assume this was a prototype unit obtained in some deal.

Model F2 seems right: https://github.com/PDP-10/FOONEX/blob/master/F2-MICROCODE/DS...

From esr's Jargon File:

> 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”

I find old hacker culture endlessly fascinating and endearing. All of my machine [host]names have "foonly" someplace in the name (foonly-fenix, macfoonly, microfoonly, foonly-iv, etc.) as a tribute to these machines.

Clearly the name came from i(f only) we had more toggle switches.

This machine is also the source of foo, as in foo bar baz, as in if only we had more toggle switches, Barry could program the ba'z'ic interpreter quicker.

See also: Flight of the Navigator | VFXCool - Captain Disillusion

A fantastic video detailing the VFX of Flight of the Navigator.

https://youtu.be/tyixMpuGEL8

It's sad to think about how many old systems like this just... disappear. Something that cost millions of dollars (before inflation!), perhaps something incredibly important to history was computed on it, then just left to the fading memories of history when deemed more trouble than it was worth.

How many of these systems still rot in barns and garages, perhaps abandoned or about to be torn down because their owner moved or died? How many relics of arguably the most important human invention are gone, or their destruction is imminent, about to be stolen from the hands of future humanity by someone who doesn't know their value? When will the artifacts of history run out?

Some of Tron was rendered on the F1: http://www.cosonok.com/2012/07/the-super-foonly-f1-computer-...

I was on a quest to find the Super Foonly for several years in the early 2000s. I never got close to finding it, but did uncover several treasure troves of documents from the early days of computer graphics companies Omnibus, Digital Productions and Robert Abel and Associates.

I think it was Larry Yaeger [1] who suggested that the collapse of Omnibus meant that a lot of the equipment in the DP machine room was sold or scrapped.

Maybe someone here has more info!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Yaeger

Not that I'm going to try a similar quest, but how does one go about starting one? Just send as much mail, email and forum posts as possible, inquiring to every person you can get the name of?

For the time period I'm interested in, change that to: inquiring to every person still living.

This comprehensive video on the special effects of Flight of the Navigator, including the role of the Foonly F1, is one of the most fascinating things I have ever seen on YouTube. I cannot recommend it enough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyixMpuGEL8

<edit: I see that someone else has already posted this video. However, I'm going to leave this comment up because holy shit watch it>

Odd that tools which could do MOST of the work like the SGI workstation or sun was available at the end, but not used.

Surely the best bits of this wreck were the 6000x4000 image printing and not much else? Run render on SGI. Write (tape if need be) sequenced images and simply shuffle them through as high resolution.

Low res wire frame animations for shot plot, and done.

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