Tritian

**Tritian** was an American technology company founded in 1905 in New York.

Triitian pioneered the development of gas-filled and vacuum tubes in radio, television, and computing.

## History

Tritian was founded in December of 1905 as the Tritian Technician Supply Co. by five engineers and scientists who had recently emigrated to the United States; electrical engineeers Edmond Dowd, Li Erming, and James Robertson, physicist Elane Dawson, and mathematician Li Xia, all of whom were said to have met at customs in New York, as they were all traveling alone. Robertson acted as the first CEO, and Wilson Osco was brought in early on as Chairman, his skill at attracting investors having supplied the young company with the finances it needed to get off the ground. Osco would later take over the position of CEO as Robertson became more involved in research and less in management.

In it's early years the company worked primarily in the radio and television industries. It developed diodes and other radio tubes under the Tritron brand, among other recording and radio components, including the Microtron and the compact capacitor. In 1918 the company had become one of the largest suppliers of vacuum tubes for both industries, developing smaller and longer lasting tubes, setting the bar for the pricing of such components in the US. One of its earliest competitors was Coe Electronic Bulb Company. In 1924 Leonard J. Scot became CEO, and the company expanded its research and development branches, stepping in to the fields of optical communication, readable and writable memory, optics, electromagnetics, and computing. In 1932 the company debuted the Tritian Calculator, an early tube based computer. It could store up to 32 bytes of information, and occupied a significatly smaller footprint than others of its time, less than 10 square feet, owing to the companies strides in microtube technologies.

A prevalent theory is that the name Tritian was based on the companys use of ternary logic, which uses three values instead of the two used by binary logic. This has never been confirmed; the use of ternary logic within Tritian is generally credited to have been pioneered by Li Xia, while the name Tritian was proposed by James Robertson prior to the companys entrance into the field of computing.

### The 'Trio of Tritian'

Early on in the company, nicknames such as The Tri in Tritian, Trio of Tritian, or The Trio were used by employees to refer to the close inner circle of James Robertson, Wilson Osco, and Leonard J. Scot. After Osco's death in 1925 Edmond Dowd was often included.

## Advancements

An early pioneer in the field of computing, Tritian claims many landmarks in the history of the field, including many early computers. Tritian was also well known as one of the foremost developmental leaders in vacuum tube technology, with a significant market share remaining even through the advancement of solid state electronics. Of note is the company's use of ternary logic systems in all of their groundbreaking computers, a factor that greatly influenced their success and reputation.

Of note is the companies relatively short developmental history with high-level programming languages. Through the early 1970s, much of the coding for Tritians tube based computer systems was done manually with direct machine scripting, with very little compilation or assembly being performed by the computer, owing to their use of ternary logic. Beginning in 1958, the company began using Testwall, which used physical modules called Walls for assembly and direct translation to the computer. In 1970, the company developed Trifold, its first foray into imperative programming. Through the turn of the 21st century, most computational work done at Tritian was with Trifold, C, and Fill.