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Information International, Inc.
Information International, Inc., commonly referred to as Triple-I or III, was an early computer technology company. Background 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 imag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Fredkin
Edward Fredkin (born October 2, 1934) is a distinguished career professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), and an early pioneer of digital physics. Fredkin's primary contributions include work on reversible computing and cellular automata. While Konrad Zuse's book, ''Calculating Space'' (1969), mentioned the importance of reversible computation, the Fredkin gate represented the essential breakthrough. In recent work, he uses the term ''digital philosophy'' (DP). During his career, Fredkin has been a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech, and Research Professor of Physics at Boston University. Early life and education At age 19, Fredkin left California Institute of Technology (Caltech) after a year to join the United States Air Force (USAF) to become a fighter pilot. Fredkin’s computer career started in 1956 when the air force assigned him to MIT Lincoln Laboratory where we worked on the SA ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Foonly
Foonly Inc. was an American computer company formed by Dave Poole in 1976, that produced a series of ''DEC PDP-10'' compatible mainframe computers, named ''Foonly F1'' to ''Foonly F5''. The first and most famous Foonly machine, the ''F1'', was the computer used by Triple-I to create some of the computer-generated imagery in the 1982 film ''Tron''. History At the beginning of the 1970s, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) began to study the building of a new computer to replace their ''DEC PDP-10 KA-10'', by a far more powerful machine, with a funding from Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This project was named "''Super-Foonly''", and was developed by a team led by Phil Petit, Jack Holloway, and Dave Poole. The name itself came from FOO NLI, an error message emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning "FOO is Not a Legal Identifier". In 1974, DARPA cut the funding, and a large part of the team went to DEC to develop the ''PDP-10 model KL10'' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Star Wars (film)
''Star Wars'' (retroactively titled ''Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope'') is a 1977 American epic space opera film written and directed by George Lucas, produced by Lucasfilm and distributed by 20th Century Fox. It is the first film in the '' Star Wars'' film series and fourth chronological chapter of the " Skywalker Saga". Set "a long time ago" in a fictional universe where the galaxy is ruled by the tyrannical Galactic Empire, the story focuses on a group of freedom fighters known as the Rebel Alliance, who aim to destroy the Empire's newest weapon, the Death Star. Luke Skywalker becomes caught in the conflict while learning the ways of a metaphysical power known as "the Force" from Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. The cast includes Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, Peter Cushing, Alec Guinness, David Prowse, James Earl Jones, Anthony Daniels, Kenny Baker, and Peter Mayhew. Lucas had the idea for a science-fiction film in the vein of '' Flash Gordon'' aro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Close Encounters Of The Third Kind
''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' is a 1977 American science fiction film written and directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Richard Dreyfuss, Melinda Dillon, Teri Garr, Bob Balaban, Cary Guffey, and François Truffaut. It tells the story of Roy Neary, an Everyman, everyday blue-collar worker in Indiana, whose life changes after an encounter with a UFO. ''Close Encounters'' was a long-cherished project for Spielberg. In late 1973, he developed a deal with Columbia Pictures for a science-fiction film. Though Spielberg received sole credit for the script, he was assisted by Paul Schrader, John Hill (screenwriter), John Hill, David Giler, Hal Barwood, Matthew Robbins (screenwriter), Matthew Robbins, and Jerry Belson, all of whom contributed to the screenplay in varying degrees. The title is derived from Ufology, Ufologist J. Allen Hynek's classification of close encounters with extraterrestrials, in which the third kind denotes human observations of extraterrestrials or "anim ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Looker
''Looker'' is a 1981 American science fiction film written and directed by Michael Crichton and starring Albert Finney, Susan Dey, and James Coburn. The film is a suspense/science-fiction piece that comments upon and satirizes media, advertising, television's effects on the populace, and a ridiculous standard of beauty. Though sparse in visual effects, the film is the first commercial film to attempt to make a computer-generated, three-dimensional, solid-looking model of a whole human body. However, as with its predecessors ''Futureworld'', ''Star Wars'', and ''Alien'', this was an example of "CGI representing CGI", and only depicted on CRT screens in the film, rather than being used as a special effect. The model had no skeletal or facial movements and was not a character. ''Looker'' was also the first film to create three-dimensional (3D) shading with a computer, months before the release of the better-known ''Tron''. Plot Dr. Larry Roberts (Finney), a Beverly Hills plastic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Red's Dream
''Red's Dream'' is a 1987 American computer-animated short film written and directed by John Lasseter and produced by Pixar. The short film, which runs four minutes, stars Red, a unicycle. Propped up in the corner of a bicycle store on a rainy night, Red dreams of a fantasy where it becomes the star of a circus. ''Red's Dream'' was Pixar's second computer-animated short following ''Luxo Jr.'' in 1986, also directed by Lasseter. ''Red's Dream'' is more strongly character-driven than ''Luxo Jr.'', Pixar's previous short film. The short was designed to demonstrate new technical innovations in imagery. The short was created by employing the company's own Pixar Image Computer, but the computer's memory limitations led the animation group to abandon it for further projects. Space was growing tight at the company, and as a result, Lasseter and his team worked out of a hallway during production, where Lasseter sometimes slept for days on end. The short film premiered at the annual SIGGRA ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pixar
Pixar Animation Studios (commonly known as Pixar () and stylized as P I X A R) is an American computer animation studio known for its critically and commercially successful computer animated feature films. It is based in Emeryville, California, United States. Since 2006, Pixar has been a subsidiary of Walt Disney Studios, which is another studio owned by The Walt Disney Company. Pixar started in 1979 as part of the Lucasfilm computer division, known as the Graphics Group, before its spin-off as a corporation in 1986, with funding from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. Disney purchased Pixar in January 2006 at a valuation of $7.4+ billion by converting each share of Pixar stock to 2.3 shares of Disney stock. Pixar is best known for its feature films, technologically powered by RenderMan, the company's own implementation of the industry-standard RenderMan Interface Specification image-rendering API. The studio's mascot is Luxo Jr., a desk ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Adam Powers, The Juggler
''Adam Powers, The Juggler'' (also known as ''The Juggler'') is a 1981 computer animation created by Richard Taylor and Gary Demos and released by Information International Inc. (Triple I). It was one of the earliest CGI animated anthropomorphic characters ever. The character was motion captured from Ken Rosenthal, a real juggler. Premise The film opens with a juggler juggling a pack of shapes (circle, square, cones, etc.) and showing the computer animation film the shapes and objects around the scene. As the version included in the DVDs and Blu-rays bonus material is taken straight from one of the company's demo reels, a Mercedes-Benz Mercedes-Benz (), commonly referred to as Mercedes and sometimes as Benz, is a German luxury and commercial vehicle automotive brand established in 1926. Mercedes-Benz AG (a Mercedes-Benz Group subsidiary established in 2019) is headquartere ... logo is seen inside the green ball, which was not in the original short film. The film ends w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Futureworld
''Futureworld'' is a 1976 American science fiction thriller film directed by Richard T. Heffron and written by Mayo Simon and George Schenck. It is a sequel to the 1973 Michael Crichton film ''Westworld'', and is the second installment in the ''Westworld'' franchise. The film stars Peter Fonda, Blythe Danner, Arthur Hill, Stuart Margolin, John Ryan, and Yul Brynner, who makes an appearance in a dream sequence; no other cast member from the original film appears. ''Westworld's'' writer-director, Michael Crichton, and the original studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer were not involved in this production. Composer Fred Karlin was retained. The film attempted to take the plot in a different direction from ''Westworld'', but it was not well received by U.S. critics. French critics appreciated the film more, appearing on the list of best science fiction films ever made in '' Demain le Science Fiction.'' It was made by American International Pictures (its predecessor was made by Metro-Goldw ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Fonda
Peter Henry Fonda (February 23, 1940 – August 16, 2019) was an American actor. He was the son of Henry Fonda, younger brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget Fonda. He was a prominent figure in the counterculture of the 1960s. Fonda was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for ''Easy Rider'' (1969), and the Academy Award for Best Actor for ''Ulee's Gold'' (1997). For the latter, he won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Drama. Fonda also won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film for ''The Passion of Ayn Rand'' (1999). Early life Fonda was born on February 23, 1940, in New York City, the only son of actor Henry Fonda (1905–1982) and his wife Frances Ford Seymour (1908–1950); his older sister is actress Jane Fonda (born 1937). He and Jane had a half-sister, Frances de Villers Brokaw (1931–2008), from their mother's first marriage. Their mother committed suicid ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Westworld (film)
''Westworld'' is a 1973 American science fiction Western film written and directed by Michael Crichton. The film follows adult guests visiting an interactive amusement park containing lifelike androids that unexpectedly begin to malfunction. The film stars Yul Brynner as an android in the amusement park, with Richard Benjamin and James Brolin as guests of the park. The film was from an original screenplay by Crichton and was his first theatrical film as director, after one TV film. It was also the first feature film to use digital image processing to pixellate photography to simulate an android point of view.A Brief, Early History of Computer Graphics in Film , , August 16, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Feature Film
A feature film or feature-length film is a narrative film (motion picture or "movie") with a running time long enough to be considered the principal or sole presentation in a commercial entertainment program. The term ''feature film'' originally referred to the main, full-length film in a cinema program that included a short film and often a newsreel. Matinee programs, especially in the US and Canada, in general, also included cartoons, at least one weekly serial and, typically, a second feature-length film on weekends. The first narrative feature film was the 60-minute ''The Story of the Kelly Gang'' (1906, Australia). Other early feature films include ''Les Misérables'' (1909, U.S.), ''L'Inferno'', ''Defence of Sevastopol'' (1911), '' Oliver Twist'' (American version), '' Oliver Twist'' (British version), '' Richard III'', ''From the Manger to the Cross'', ''Cleopatra'' (1912), '' Quo Vadis?'' (1913), ''Cabiria'' (1914) and ''The Birth of a Nation'' (1915). Description The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
