Information International, Inc.
Information International Inc.'s official logo
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| Industry |
Computer hardware Computer software Computer-generated imagery |
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| Fate | Merged with Autologic in 1996, acquired by Agfa-Gevaert in 2001 |
| Successor | Autologic Information International, Inc. (AIII) (1996-2001) |
| Founded | 1962 |
| Founder | Edward Fredkin |
| Defunct | 2001 (acquired by Agfa-Gevaert) |
| Headquarters | Los Angeles, California, [United States |
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Number of locations
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Maynard, MA, Santa Monica, CA Culver City, CA Los Angeles, CA |
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Area served
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United States United Kingdom |
| Subsidiaries | III Motion Pictures Products Group (1974-1982) |
Information International, Inc., commonly referred to as Triple-I or III, was an early computer technology company.
The company was founded by Edward Fredkin in 1962 in Maynard, Massachusetts. It then moved (serially) to Santa Monica, Culver City, and Los Angeles California. Triple-I merged with Autologic, Inc. in 1996, becoming Autologic Information International Inc. (AIII). The combined company was purchased by Agfa-Gevaert in 2001.
In the early 1960s, Information International Inc. contributed several articles by Ed Fredkin, Malcolm Pivar, and Elaine Gord, and others, in a major book on the programming language LISP and its applications.
Triple-I's commercially successful technology was centered around very high precision CRTs, capable of recording to film; which for a while were the publishing industry's gold standard for digital-to-film applications. The company also manufactured film scanners using special cameras fitted with photomultiplier tubes as the image sensor, for digitzing existing films and paper documents. One such successful product of theirs using their precision CRT technology was their FR-80 film recorder introduced in 1968. It was capable of recording black & white (and later color as an option) digital imagery to motion picture or still transparency film at a maximum resolution of 16384x16384, making it an ideal system for generating either Computer Output Microfilm (COM), computer-to-film negatives for making printing plates, and other computer-generated graphics.
However, Triple-I is most notable for its commercially unsuccessful ventures; a number of one-or-two of a kind systems which included CRT based computer displays used at the Stanford AI Lab, an OCR system based on PDP-10's (two were sold), and The Super Foonly F-1 - which was used for movie special effects.
Triple-I had a very ambitious OCR group which used their core film scanning technology, graphic displays, and a custom binary image processor (BIP); all interfaced to a PDP-10 timesharing computer with lots of custom software. Although it was continuously under development over a period of more than 10 years, only two actual systems were ever sold. The first (circa 1974) was a paper-to-digital-to-paper system for reworking U.S. Navy aircraft maintenance manuals, which involved filming and scanning paper manuals, capturing the many diagrams in digital form, and reading the accompanying text. The second (circa 1976) was a hand-print recognition system sold to the British NHS, which captured data from benefit forms.
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