Private company

Foonly

Logo: Foonly Inc., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons³

Computer company

Foonly Inc. was an American computer company formed by Dave Poole in 1976, that produced a series of DEC PDP-10 compatible mainframe computers. The first and most famous Foonly machine, the F1, was the computer used by Triple-I to create some of the computer-generated imagery in the 1982 film Tron.² Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0

Last updated Oct 21, 2026.

Overview

See how the biggest companies compare on our leaderboards

Foonly Inc. was an American computer company formed by Dave Poole in 1976, that produced a series of DEC PDP-10 compatible mainframe computers.²

The story

At the beginning of the 1970s, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) began to study the building of a new computer to replace their DEC PDP-10 KA10, by a far more powerful machine, with a funding from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This project was named "Super-Foonly", and was developed by a team led by Phil Petit, Jack Holloway, and Dave Poole. 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". In 1974, DARPA cut the funding, and a large part of the team went to DEC to develop the PDP-10 model KL10, based on the Super-Foonly.

But Dave Poole, with Phil Petit and Jack Holloway, preferred to found the Foonly Company in 1976, to try to build a series of computers based on the Super-Foonly.

During the early 1980s, after the construction of the first and only F1, Foonly built and sold some low cost DEC PDP-10 compatible machines: the F2, F4, F4B and F5.

In 1983, after the cancellation of the DEC Jupiter project, Foonly tried to propose a new F1, but it was eclipsed by Systems Concepts and their Mars project. Foonly never recovered, shutting down in 1989.

From Wikipedia’s article on Foonly, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.⁴

Products and brands

supercomputer

Listed on Wikidata.¹

Other models

Unlike the F1, the other models (F2, F4, F4B, F5) were built with the slower TTL rather than ECL circuits, and housed in a single cabinet, rather than four.

Rather than use DEC's Massbus (or other DEC buses), Foonly developed F-bus, which can work with DEC and non-DEC peripherals.

F2

Foonly described the F2 as "a powerful mainframe at a minicomputer price," "with an average execution speed about 25% of that of the DECSYSTEM-2060."

Software

The Foonly machines, which could run the TENEX operating system, came with a derivative thereof, FOONEX.