Triple I

Around 1975, Gary Demos, John Whitney Jr, and Jim Blinn persuaded Triple I management to put together a "movie group" and try to get some "Hollywood dollars". They created various demos that showed the potential for computer graphics to do amazing things, among them the Mercedes Benz logo, a KCET station ID, a 3D scan of Peter Fonda's head, and the ultimate demo, Adam Powers, or "the Juggler". Of course III was very concerned about how they were going to ever make any money on this rapidly escalating movie group, so they were very focused on projects like TRON*. These early demos were done on Triple-I's KA-10 computers, which were old and considered slow even then.

Triple-I was eventually employed by Disney along with three other companies MAGI/Synthavision, Robert Abel & Associates, and Digital Effects, to create the CGI in TRON. Two of these companies MAGI and Triple-I had the mammoth task of creating the majority of the CGI work which totaled roughly 20 or so minutes worth of the imagery we see in the film.

Unlike MAGI, who used basic geometrical shapes when creating the graphics such as the Light Cycles, Triple-I could create complex multi-curve designs and so were responsible for generating the images of the Solar Sailer, the MCP, and Sark's Carrier, to name a few.

When creating the images, they used a digitizing tablet that was approximately 4' x 6' and used the one-of-a-kind Foonly F-1, the fastest PD-10 computer ever built, to generate all of their graphics. The F-1 was roughly 10x the speed of a KA-10.

The F-1 was designed by by Dave Poole, Phil Pettit, and Jack Holloway, and built at Triple-I in Culver City.

Source: http://www.tron-sector.com/articles/view.aspx?id=30

Triple-I uses a system called ASAS (Actor/Scriptor Animation System), a vector graphics method which utilizes polygons to create complex shapes like the face of the MCP as it gives its commands to Sark. This system uses a vector plotter to trace drawn images into a Foonly F1 computer, a cheaper variant of the PDP-10. These are then generated on a FR80 film recorder manufactured by the company.

Source: http://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=games-on-film-i-tron&page=3