Foonly for the Future

[Henry G. Baker]

>     Date: Thu, 1 May 1997 21:22 CDT
>     From: hbaker@netcom.com (Henry G. Baker)
> 
>     Moon hacked up a simple Lisp-based TeX-equivalent around 1979-80 time
>     frame.  I think that some of the earliest SMBX docs were written in
>     it.  It ran in Maclisp on the SMBX Foonly (pdp10 emulator).  It was
>     slow as sh*t, because it ran completely interpreted (I think), and it
>     was running on a really slow machine.  I don't know what happened to
>     that program, or even what it was called.
> 
> Ok, you've befuddled me, are you actually saying that there used to be a
> 10 emulator running on the LispM?  
> 
> I wonder how it would perform on an XL1200.  I want to try.  Any idea
> where I can find this "SMBX Foonly"?  Should I ask Moon?

The Foonly was a separate machine developed by a company that wanted
to compete with DEC in building pdp10's.  Jack Holloway had been
involved in doing this before SMBX.  SMBX purchased one in order to
have something to use as a computer before the first LM-2's were
built.  I don't recall whether it ran ITS or Tenex.

On the other hand, I do recall that someone was working on a pdp10
simulator for the LispM.  They wanted to port the hw drawing and
simulation system ('suds' ??).  I don't know if it ever worked or not.

-- 
Henry Baker
www/ftp directory URL:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/home.html