Yes, they merged @ 1996 with the new company being named AII ("A" eye-eye). Then the combined company was bought by AGFA @2001. All the big daily newspapers used their photo typesetters, the Autologic model APS6 and/or the III 3850.
They were fast and didn't break much and used Harlequin Rips so publications could have any front end systems that spoke postscript. The Mac was coming into it's own as a relatively inexpensive non-proprietary publishing platform and the publishers and print houses liked that.
Right before the year 2000 scare, all the newspapers bought new ones with the result that Autologic/III made a bundle in 1999, then didn't really have any big orders for the following few years. I know that the LA Times bought 18 of them alone at @ $75K each. As the newspapers transitioned from film to computer-to-plate in the following years, AII couldn't keep up and was ultimately bought by AGFA. There was a lot of competition in the CTP arena back then. I think AGFA moved the company to Cambridge, MA, from Thousand Oaks, California.
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From: Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net>
Sent: Wednesday, January 31, 2018 4:23 PM
To: Wayne S
Subject: Re: Foonlies
Triple I / Autologic? Interesting. I remember (from around 1978) III and Autologic as two separate manufacturers of phototypesetting machines, with III rather obscure, very large physically (a small room) and very fast. Did they merge?
paul
> On Jan 31, 2018, at 2:52 PM, Wayne S via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Was this the machine that Triple I/Autologic created to digitize old color film movies?
> AFIK, it used lasers to scan the film and create digital color seps that were recombined later in the process. It was used in the Kate Winslett / Leonardo DiCaprio remake of "Titanic". Autologic even got a mention in the movie credits.
>
> Autologic donated that machine to UCLA for their film preservation archive project.
>
> Wayne
