F1B - PDP-10/foonly GitHub Wiki

STANFORD COMMISSIONS COMPUTER TO REPLACE LARGE DEC-20'S.

STANFORD -- Stanford University is negotiating with a small Silicon Valley company to build large computers to replace the ubiquitous DECSYSTEM-20s now "orphaned" by their manufacturer, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC).

The proposed contract, which would total around $1.4 million, would commision two machines from Foonly Inc. of Mountain View for delivery early in 1986. Foonly is owned by former Stanford student David Poole.

According to Len Bosack, director of the Computer Science Department's Computer Facilities, the Foonly F1B computer system is about four times faster than the DEC model 2060 and 10 times faster when doing floating-point computations (where the decimal point need not be in the same place in each of the numbers calculated) that are characteristic of large-scale engineering and scientific problems.

Ralph Gorin, director of Stanford's Low Overhead Time Sharing (LOTS) Facility -- the academic computer center -- said the Foonly F1B system, which is totally compatible with the DEC-20, is an outgrowth of design work done by Poole and others while at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Since 1977, Foonly has built one large system, the F1, and several dozen smaller systems. The Foonly F1B is a descendant of the original F1, with changes reflecting advances in integrated circuit technology and the architectural refinements (internal design) of the latest DEC-20s.

A spokesman for DEC said the company announced last year it had discontinued work on a successor to the DEC-20, code named "Jupiter," and would continue to sell enhanced versions of the large mainframe. Service on the machines was promised for the next ten years.

However, said Sandra Lerner, director of the Computing Facilities at the Graduate School of Business, the discontinuation of DEC-20 development left approximately 1,000 customers world-wide without a practicable "growth path."

Ten DECSYSTEM-20 computers on campus make that machine the most numerous large system at Stanford.

The Graduate School of Business uses its two DEC-20s for administration, coursework, and research. The Computer Science Department uses two systems for research and administration. LOTS, the academic computer facility, supports instruction and unsponsored research on three systems and hopes to add one more in the time before the F1B is available.

Other DEC-20s are at the Department of Electrical Engineering, the artifical intelligence project at the Medical Center (SUMEX), and the recently formed Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).

The Stanford University Network (SUNet), the main university computer communications network, links together the 10 DEC-20s, approximately 30 mid-size computers, about 100 high-performance workstations, and nearly 400 terminals and personal computers.

The DEC-20 has been a cornerstone of research in artificial intelligence (AI). Most of the large AI systems evolved on the DEC-20 and its predecessors. For this reason, Stanford and other computer science centers depend on these systems for their on-going research.

Lerner said the alternative to the new systems would entail prohibitive expense to change all programs accumulated over nearly twenty years at Stanford and to retrain several thousand student, faculty, and staff users of these systems. The acquisition of the Foonly systems would be a deliberate effort to preserve these university investments.