or the religious study of symbolics . this article needs additional citations for verification . please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources . unsourced material may be challenged and removed . august 2014 learn how and when to remove this template message symbolics former type public industry computer systems computer software fate bankrupted successor privately held symbolics inc. founded april 9 1980 ; 36 years ago 1980 04 09 cambridge massachusetts u.s. founders russell noftsker defunct may 7 1996 1996 05 07 1 headquarters concord massachusetts u.s. products servers workstations storage services website www.symbolics dks.com symbolics 3600 symbolics refers to two companies now defunct computer manufacturer symbolics inc. and a privately held company that acquired the assets of the former company and continues to sell and maintain the open genera lisp system and the macsyma computer algebra system . 2 the symbolics.com domain was originally registered on march 15 1985 3 making it the first . com domain in the world . in august 2009 it was sold to xf.com investments . 4 contents 1 history 1.1 the 3600 series 1.2 ivory and open genera 1.3 sunstone 1.4 endgame 1.5 first . com domain 2 networking 3 application programs 4 contributions to computer science 5 symbolics graphics division 5.1 movies 6 references 7 further reading 8 external links history edit a view of running processes in a symbolics machine symbolics inc. 5 was a computer manufacturer headquartered in cambridge massachusetts and later in concord massachusetts with manufacturing facilities in chatsworth california a suburban section of los angeles . its first ceo chairman and founder was russell noftsker . 6 symbolics designed and manufactured a line of lisp machines single user computers optimized to run the lisp programming language . symbolics also made significant advances in software technology and offered one of the premier software development environments of the 1980s and 1990s now sold commercially as open genera for tru64 unix on the hp alpha . the lisp machine was the first commercially available workstation although that word had not yet been coined . symbolics was a spinoff from the mit ai lab one of two companies to be founded by ai lab staffers and associated hackers for the purpose of manufacturing lisp machines . the other was lisp machines inc. although symbolics attracted most of the hackers and more funding . symbolics initial product the lm 2 introduced in 1981 was a repackaged version of the mit cadr lisp machine design . the operating system and software development environment over 500 000 lines was written in lisp from the microcode up based on mit s lisp machine lisp . the software bundle was later renamed zetalisp to distinguish the symbolics product from other vendors who had also licensed the mit software . symbolics zmacs text editor a variant of emacs was implemented in a text processing package named zwei an acronym for zwei was eine initially with eine being an acronym for eine is not emacs . both are recursive acronyms and puns on the german words for one eins eine and two zwei . the lisp machine system software was then copyrighted by mit and was licensed to symbolics . until 1981 they shared all the source code with mit and kept it on an mit server . according to richard stallman symbolics engaged in a business tactic in which it forced mit to make all fixes and improvements to the lisp machine os available only to symbolics and thereby choke off its competitor lmi which at that time had insufficient resources to independently maintain or develop the os and environment . 7 symbolics felt that they no longer had sufficient control over their product . at that point symbolics began using their own copy of the software located on their company servers while stallman says that symbolics did that to prevent its lisp improvements from flowing to lisp machines inc. from that base symbolics made extensive improvements to every part of the software and continued to deliver almost all the source code to their customers including mit . however the policy prohibited mit staff from distributing the symbolics version of the software to others . with the end of open collaboration came the end of the mit hacker community . as a reaction to this stallman initiated the gnu project to make a new community . eventually copyleft and the gnu general public license would ensure that a hacker s software could remain free software . in this way symbolics played a key albeit adversarial role in instigating the free software movement . cadr machines model year description lm 2 1981 workstation based on the mit cadr architecture the 3600 series edit symbolics 3640 symbolics 3600 front panel symbolics boards in 1983 a year later than planned symbolics introduced the 3600 family of lisp machines . code named the l machine internally the 3600 family was an innovative new design inspired by the cadr architecture but sharing few of its implementation details . the main processor had a 36 bit word divided up as 4 or 8 bits of tags and 32 bits of data or 28 bits of memory address . memory words were 44 bits the additional 8 bits being used for error correcting code ecc . the instruction set was that of a stack machine . the 3600 architecture provided 4 096 hardware registers of which half were used as a cache for the top of the control stack ; the rest were used by the microcode and time critical routines of the operating system and lisp run time environment . hardware support was provided for virtual memory which was common for machines in its class and for garbage collection which was unique . the original 3600 processor was a microprogrammed design like the cadr and was built on several large circuit boards from standard ttl integrated circuits both features being common for commercial computers in its class at the time . cpu clock speed varied depending on the particular instruction being executed but was typically around 5 mhz . many lisp primitives could be executed in a single clock cycle . disk i o was handled by multitasking at the microcode level . a 68000 processor known as the front end processor or fep started the main computer up and handled the slower peripherals during normal operation . an ethernet interface was standard equipment replacing the chaosnet interface of the lm 2 . the 3600 was roughly the size of a household refrigerator . this was partly due to the size of the processor the cards were widely spaced to allow wire wrap prototype cards to fit without interference and partly due to the limitations of the disk drive technology in the early 1980s . at the 3600 s introduction the smallest disk that could support the zetalisp software was 14 inches 356 mm across most 3600s shipped with the 10 inch fujitsu eagle . the 3670 and 3675 were slightly shorter in height but were essentially the same machine packed a little tighter . the advent of 8 inches 200 mm and later 5 1 4 inches 130 mm disk drives that could hold hundreds of megabytes led to the introduction of the 3640 and 3645 which were roughly the size of a two drawer file cabinet . later versions of the 3600 architecture were implemented on custom integrated circuits reducing the five cards of the original processor design to two at a large manufacturing cost savings and with performance slightly better than the old design . the 3650 first of the g machines as they were known within the company was housed in a cabinet derived from the 3640s . denser memory and smaller disk drives enabled the introduction of the 3620 about the size of a modern full size tower pc . the 3630 was a fat 3620 with room for more memory and video interface cards . the 3610 was a lower priced variant of the 3620 essentially identical in every way except that it was licensed for application deployment rather than general development . 36xx machines model year description 3600 1983 workstation 3670 1984 workstation 3640 1984 workstation 3675 1985 workstation 3645 1985 workstation symbolics keyboard the various models of the 3600 family were popular for ai research and commercial applications throughout the 1980s . the ai commercialization boom of the 1980s led directly to symbolics success during the decade . symbolics computers were widely believed to be the best platform available for developing ai software . the lm 2 used a symbolics branded version of the complex space cadet keyboard 8 while later models used a simplified version at right known simply as the symbolics keyboard . 9 the symbolics keyboard featured the many modifier keys used in zmacs notably control meta super hyper in a block but did not feature the complex symbol set of the space cadet keyboard . also contributing to the 3600 series success was a line of bit mapped graphics color video interfaces combined with extremely powerful animation software . symbolics graphics division headquartered in westwood california a stone s throw from the major hollywood movie and television studios made its s render and s paint software into industry leaders in the animation business . symbolics developed the first workstations capable of processing hdtv quality video which enjoyed a popular following in japan . a 3600 with the standard black and white monitor made a cameo appearance in the movie real genius . the company was also referenced in michael crichton s novel jurassic park . symbolics graphics division was sold to nichimen trading company in the early 1990s and the s graphics software suite s paint s geometry s dynamics s render ported to franz allegro common lisp on sgi and pc computers running windows nt . today it is sold as mirai by izware llc and continues to be used in major motion pictures most famously in new line cinema s the lord of the rings video games and military simulations . 3600 ports with connection machine interface symbolic s 3600 series computers were also used as the first front end controller computers for the connection machine massively parallel computers manufactured by thinking machines inc. another mit spinoff based in cambridge massachusetts . the connection machine ran a parallel variant of lisp and initially was used primarily by the ai community so the symbolics lisp machine was a particularly good fit as a front end machine . for a long time the operating system didn t have a name but was finally named genera around 1984 . the system included a number of advanced dialects of lisp . its heritage was maclisp on the pdp 10 but it included more data types and multiple inheritance object oriented programming features . this lisp dialect was called lisp machine lisp at mit . symbolics used the name zetalisp . symbolics later wrote new software in symbolics common lisp its version of the common lisp standard . ivory and open genera edit a screenshot of the included help documentation in genera displayed by document examiner . in the late 1980s 2 years later than planned the ivory family of single chip lisp machine processors superseded the g machine 3650 3620 and 3630 systems . the ivory 390k transistor vlsi implementation designed in symbolics common lisp using ns a custom symbolics hardware design language hdl addressed a 40 bit word 8 bits tag 32 bits data address . since it only addressed full words and not bytes or half words this allowed addressing of 4 gigawords gw or 16 gigabytes gb of memory ; the increase in address space reflected the growth of programs and data as semiconductor memory and disk space became cheaper . the ivory processor had 8 bits of ecc attached to each word so each word fetched from external memory to the chip was actually 48 bits