Foonly n.
1. The 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 name itself came from FOO NLI, an error message
emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning "FOO is Not a Legal
Identifier". The intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing 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. Most of the design team
went to DEC and contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10
model KL10. 2. The name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one
of the principal Super Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's
more colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot
which sat on Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion. 3. Any
of the machines built by Poole's company. The first was the F-1
(a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the computational engine used to
create the graphics in the movie "TRON". 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 towards
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. See the Mars entry for the
continuation and moral of this story.
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footprint n.
1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware. 2.
[IBM] The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often
in plural, `footprints'). See also toeprint. 3. RAM footprint: The
minimum amount of RAM which an OS or other program takes; this
figure gives one an idea of how much will be left for other
applications. How actively this RAM is used is another matter
entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and software bloat can
expand the RAM footprint of an OS to the point of making it
nearly unusable in practice. [This problem is, thankfully,
limited to operating systems so stupid that they don't do virtual
memory - ESR]