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From: mrc@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Crispin)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.arch
Subject: Re: XDS940 computer (or Xerox Sigma 9)
Message-ID: <1991Jun11.235825.1338@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 11 Jun 91 23:58:25 GMT
References: <1991Jun8.085847.7980@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <1991Jun10.235301.2946@leland.Stanford.EDU> <1991Jun11.231151.16752@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 24

In article <1991Jun11.231151.16752@m.cs.uiuc.edu> gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Don Gillies) writes:
>No, in the early 1980's when DEC announced it was halting production
>and enhancement of the DECsystem10 and DECsystem20 series (i.e.
>cancelling the "Venus" project), many universities were upset and
>claimed they could not live without new DEC-10 series computers.
>Perhaps "Foonly" was the name of one of the companies organized in an
>attempt to build more DEC-10 - type machines.

Most of the above is wrong.

Foonly grew out of the "Super Foonly" project at the Stanford
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the early 1970's.  When this
project was cancelled by the funding authorities, many of its people
went to DEC, the result being the PDP-10 model KL10 in 1974/5.

Dave Poole created his own company, Foonly, and built one Super-Foonly
(the F1) which was installed at III.  Poole also built several smaller
KS10 class machines which ran Tenex, in the 1970's and early 1980's:
the F2, F3, and F4.  These machines were hand-built and required
competant site personnel to maintain them, something that often did
not exist.

The cancelled (1983) project to build a follow-on to the KL10 at DEC
was the Jupiter.  The Venus is better known as the VAX 8600.