3 ms·
I know some of the dramatis personae of this story, and even exchanged messages with one of them the other day. There are some funny believable episodes in tha
by gumby 4y ago
I know some of the dramatis personae of this story, and even exchanged messages with one of them the other day. There are some funny believable episodes in that story.
I believe Symbolics (seemingly famous these days only for being the first domain name in the DNS) had an F2 because they couldn't afford a real PDP-10 and if you know what they thought of it its name was pos.symbolics.com (i.e. "piece of shit")
There's also some gibberish in the early part of the story. For example the first interactive vector graphics game was of course SPACEWAR, which I have played on the original hardware.
- larsbrinkhoff 4y agoFirst .com, not first domain name ever.
- jdontillman 4y agoSymbolics veteran here... Ahh, fond memories. Indeed, we had a Foonly. I don't know the model number, but it was a single rack unit. We used it as a server, software development, SUDS electrical CAD, etc. And yes, it's name was "pos". That was never meant to be particularly nasty; more like an optimistic end-of-an-era kind of thing. And I have to say, it was pretty reliable. I can't remember it ever dying. At least two early Symbolics folks were involved with Foonly, so I assume this was a prototype unit obtained in some deal.
- larsbrinkhoff 4y agoModel F2 seems right: https://github.com/PDP-10/FOONEX/blob/master/F2-MICROCODE/DSK:%3CF2-MICROCODE%3EF2SYM.SLO%3B3#L1 https://github.com/PDP-10/FOONEX/blob/master/F2-MICROCODE/DS...