Foonlies

[Rich Alderson]

From: Lars Brinkhoff
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 11:28 AM

> Al Kossow wrote:

>>> SUPERFOONLY   DESIGNED 1968-71
>>> 10,000 TTL IC'S
>>> 3 MIPS

>> Was this ever built? 10K ICs would have been bigger than the Livermore S-1.

> This says the Superfoonly was designed.  Doesn't say it was actually
> built.  Triple-I funded the construction of the updated design, the F1.
> 
>   "The original superfoonly was designed at Stanford, on an ARPA
>   contract, but Dave Poole, Phil Pettit, and Jack Holloway. There was
>   also a fourth whose role (I think) was to build the CAD system which
>   was used for the design. He later went to work for DEC. DEC took the
>   foonly design and lobotomized it, which became the KL10. The other
>   three came to Triple-I with a proposal to build an updated version of
>   the original design (using ECL instead of TTL).
> 
> http://dave.zfxinc.net/ddyer.html

The fourth guy was Dick Helliwell, who was hired by DEC when they licensed SUDS
from SAIL.  I met Dick when we both worked at XKL; he was the major part of the
effort to make SUDS run on the X Window System, on the KL-10 and later on the
Toad-1.  I'm going to disagree with the history Al posted, because Dick himself
told me the story.

He also ported Perl 4 and the GNU utilities and Emacs to TOPS-20.

                                                                Rich


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Systems Engineer
Living Computers: Museum + Labs
2245 1st Avenue S
Seattle, WA 98134

mailto:RichA at LivingComputers.org

http://www.LivingComputers.org/