Information International (Triple-I)

~ the last words ~

Edward Fredkin founded Information International in 1962 in Maynard, Massachusetts, and almost nobody called it that. It was Triple-I, or III, and for three decades it sold imaging hardware: machines that turned digital data into film, and machines that turned paper back into digital data. The company moved west in stages and ended up in Los Angeles.

The FR-80 film recorder arrived in 1968 and could resolve 16,384 by 16,384 pixels, which in 1968 was an absurd number and is still a respectable one. Optical character recognition was the other line, developed over more than ten years and sold exactly twice: a paper-to-digital-to-paper system that reworked United States Navy aircraft maintenance manuals, and a hand-print reader sold to the British DHSS in 1976 for capturing data off benefit forms. Two installations against a decade of development, and the contracts still paid.

In 1974 Gary Demos and John Whitney Jr. talked the company into founding a Motion Pictures Product Group, and without that group nobody outside the prepress trade would know the name Triple-I. They had already used the company's equipment for the android vision effect in Westworld, the first computer imaging in a feature film. In 1976 they scanned and animated Peter Fonda's head for Futureworld, the first appearance of 3D computer graphics in a movie. The hardware underneath was a Foonly F-1, a PDP-10 compatible that Triple-I had sponsored into existence.

Then 1982 happened twice. Disney hired four companies for Tron, and Triple-I and MAGI between them produced most of its roughly thirty minutes of computer animation, including the Master Control Program and the Solar Sailer. Whitney and Demos left before the work was finished, to start Digital Productions. Later that same year the management closed the Motion Pictures Product Group. The company that had just put computer animation in front of a mass audience decided graphics was not its business.

~ the record ~

~ the prepress business ~

The business that paid the bills was prepress. In 1982 the Pasadena Star-News became the first newspaper to produce full pages electronically, on a Triple-I system later renamed NPS, and The Wall Street Journal adapted the same approach into computer-to-plate production. That is a real first for newspaper production. It also had a short shelf life: by April 1990 the Los Angeles Business Journal was reporting that the Star-News had dumped the once-heralded system.

~ thirty minutes of Tron ~

Tron reached me on Turkish television, dubbed, long after 1982, already an old film by the time it arrived. None of it looked like computer graphics to a kid, it looked like a style someone had chosen. The Solar Sailer is the sequence that stayed, and it took years more to learn that the machine rendering it was a one-off mainframe in Los Angeles, funded by a company whose customers were newspaper production departments and government agencies.

Computer graphics history remembers Triple-I as a place rather than as a product. Craig Reynolds wrote ASAS there, and David Em spent eighteen months of nights making images on the equipment. When the group closed, the people went to Digital Productions and to the new Symbolics Graphics Division, and the techniques went with them.

~ what Volt bought ~

The 1990s went badly. Wikipedia says only that Triple-I missed several technology changes, a phrasing that covers a proprietary imaging box losing to commodity machines running PostScript. Volt Information Sciences incorporated a Delaware company called Autologic, Incorporated on 15 September 1995 and renamed it on 8 November. Triple-I's stockholders then voted, on 29 January 1996, to merge their company into that one. The 10-K filed a year later puts it flatly: Information International was merged with and into AII.

The combined company did 89.2 million dollars of revenue in fiscal 1996 with 418 employees and ran out of Thousand Oaks, while Triple-I's old Los Angeles headquarters went up for sublease. Agfa-Gevaert agreed to buy the whole thing on 26 September 2001 at 7.127 dollars a share, roughly 42.5 million dollars. Volt, holder of about 59 percent, agreed to tender its stake. The offer expired at the end of November after a wait on Austrian regulatory approval, and Agfa announced the completed purchase on 3 December 2001.

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