Don't have much to add except to mention again that the magic number for TIF is 42, and it's 42 because of the meaning of 42:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210108174645/https://www.adobe...

  Bytes 2-3
  An arbitrary but carefully chosen number (42) that further identifies the file as a TIFF file

If you had told me an article ostensibly about a file format would have me teary-eyed by the end I wouldn't have believed you. This is beautiful, thank you!

I checked the TIFF talk page and found comments from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scarlsen

Turns out the answer was on Wikipedia already :).

The great thing about TIF was it's extensibility. Flexible (data could be stored as tiles or in stripes), multiple compression options etc.

Well documented spec, easy to bolt on extras either as public tags - GeoTIFFs added projection metadata - or private, for your own needs.

Back in the day, to improve a desktop application's performance I found it was simple to create a custom reader and writer to handle cases where tiles were completely one single colour removing the need to decompress at run time.

Thank you TIFf!

His obituary is lovely: https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlse...

I have a habit of filling my head with all kinds of trivia/information. Sometimes I think this is a useless habit.

Not today. I will try to remember the name of Mr. Stephen Carlsen as the inventor of TIFF format as long as I can. As a mediocre programmer, it is the least amount of respect I can pay for an unsung but talented engineer of an era that is fast going past us.

Quietly thankful that the spec author didn't proclaim that we've been mispronouncing "TIFF" all these years.

Am I missing something ?

The article is great but the web site is supposedly related to a book "inventing the future".. which is nowhere to be found. Other than a big, slowly loading graphic, 3 posts and indexes for the book... the site doesn't provide a clue about where to acquire the actual (PDF only?) book.

I assume you have to sign up to find out more ?

On the web I can only find articles about the book.

So.. what is the deal in making the actual book hard to find ?

Edit: I think I cracked the code: Click Home, Open "Close Your Rings" article, scroll all the way down, find link: https://books.by/john-buck?ref=inventingthefuture.ghost.io

John, your 10,000+ hours of research isn't just documenting inventions—it's lighting up the lamps for those hidden geniuses. Stephen Carlsen's story reminds me that our digital world stands on the shoulders of countless 'Mr TIFF's. RIP, and thanks for making his name eternal. PS: What's your next invention-hunting target?

RIP Mr. TIFF. Hoping we continue to document these incredible engineers and their work before it's lost to the sands of time/pits of LLM muck.

Beautiful essay. So much of the tech we use today originates from quiet humble builders and creators like Mr TIFF.

I'll admit that the only time I ever interacted with a TIFF file was the buffer overflow exploit in the PSP Photo Viewer. RIP Mr. TIFF.

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/PSP/Homebrew_History?useskin=v...

:) Pleased to see the wikipedia change landed without drama. It’s still there as of writing.

Pretty amazing investigation work. Very nice to see that credit is being given where due.

  I had downloaded the final Aldus TIFF specifications document, hoping to find the author’s name. However, the name is seemingly written in white text on white paper - making it invisible. What?

Respect to those unsung engineers who made such lasting contributions, and to the author as well. This kind of work is not easy, but truly meaningful. I do have a question, though: shouldn’t the creation of industry standards also allow individual attribution, similar to how patents credit inventors?

Beautiful and moving. Thank you author of the article and thank you Mr TIFF

Oh man, this is a really nice ending to his story. I'm glad this happened.

Nice read. It was touching and it's great that credit is given where credit is due now.

TIFF indeed -- I recall the floppy disk for Mac mailed from Seattle with the TIFF spec printed on paper. A few weeks later, another graphics editor with TIFF support. I never, ever heard the name Carlsen until today. Thank you for this article

눈물나게 감동적이었습니다.

Did a similar deep dive for one of the posters for the cult classic movie Possession (1981). Just giving random phone numbers a call is incredibly effective, lots of people are happy to reminisce about old work and have great stories.

It’s so inspiring to see someone spend years uncovering the real people behind tech we use every day. This kind of dedication keeps our digital history alive.

Me: “This link can’t possibly be about what I think it might be about.” Me, seconds later: “Yes it is!!”

I had exposure to TIFF files shortly after the format creation in 1985/86, before the final form specification in 1992.

Not mentioned in either the article or the tail end wikipedia article iamge was the early adoption of TIFF by the mapping and geodetic community to store raster line data (maps, images, and raw sat and instrument platform multichannel line data).

The tagging format made the embedding of spheroids, datums, projections, origins, lens and focal specifications relatively easy (plus or minus the usual Tower of Babel Tag Naming and Meaning Confusion).

Thank you John Buck for this article, it is so interesting to read how something so common was invented. RIP Mr Tiff

And that’s a wonderful lesson to try searching alternate spellings of names for an oral history.

I see you played the NYT Connections on 11/4.

Beautiful

Crazy this information would have probably been lost in time if one single person on this planet didn’t give a shit like the rest of us.

What a journey and congratulations to SC (don't want to spoil it) on your 15 minutes and rightful restoration as inventor of TIFF, take your place in history.

This is valuable work in cataloging the foundations of the computing industry!

It's weird to see times one has lived through presented as ancient history....

Glad that the information was preserved in the magazines, usenet messages and just text files. That will not happen with the modern web software, the internet is the dark ages of our time. All those Java,Flash amazing pieces of software and the stories of their creators will be gone long before the internet dies from LLM slop.

Back when I was working in the book publishing industry (writing and typesetting computer books using Quark XPress [1] on the old MacOS [version 7, 8 and 9 IIRC], before Adobe's InDesign [2] ruled the earth), TIFF was all the rage. Probably still is.

I think the reason TIFF was so prevalent was it already had support for CMYK color space (even though many books were printed in black and white) and for lossless compression (as TFA mentions).

It was a "one size fits all" format and so our 100 or 250 MB (!) Zip drives [3] exchanged between authors/publisher/typesetters often contained TIFF files.

> For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use.

So thank you Mr. Stephen "TIFF" Carlsen!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_InDesign

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive

Please do not let my comment take away your enjoyment of the article.

I hate to nit-pick on such a beautiful story but that it ended with a faux-Ghibli profile picture is just sad.

How can someone working so hard to humanize technology and preserve history, justify this soul-less commodification of art? Do the animators deserve to get treated as anonymous model trainers without their consent, names and frames lost in a dead ocean of bit-vectors?