10 ms·
Mr TIFF
- righthand 1y agoCrazy 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.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks righthand, i guess it was just curiosity that led me down the path. most people do give a sh## but i hear you. i also had the time to search, as i wasn't super busy with work.
- righthand 1y agoThank you so much again for your efforts, I sound brash but this really is inspiring and as you demonstrated and have indicated, we can all use our free time to easily make the world a little more accurate and better.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Nition 1y agoI'd like to add, it's really nice when good people get recognized purely for their work, rather than because they're loud enough to be noticed. I very much appreciate people like yourself that take the time to look for the quiet ones like this.
- mikestorrent 1y agoPretty amazing investigation work. Very nice to see that credit is being given where due.
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoI participated in creating a history book, in regard to an organization in which I’m involved. It took eight years, and was a lot of work. The process that he mentioned is quite familiar. Many of the folks we interviewed have since passed away. Some, before the book was complete.
- mikestorrent 1y agoThreads like this are, in a sense, like a digital wake - we can all mourn Carlsen a little bit now. I remember the first time I saw a .TIF - on Rainbow Paint, a free paint program bundled with a Dexxa mouse my old man bought as an upgrade for our 286. To me, running across a random .tif somewhere was such a delight, something I could open as a surprise, maybe re-use parts of, zoom into, etc. or share on a disk with a friend. It's quaint, now...
- lookingdesk 1y agoI checked the TIFF talk page and found comments from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scarlsen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scarlsen Turns out the answer was on Wikipedia already :).
- adzm 1y agoIf anyone can contact John Buck this sounds like information he'd be interested in. Also an interesting avenue for future investigative work.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks adam
- pinkmuffinere 1y agoHey John, I'm just curious how people find these comments about "would be nice if X saw this" on HN. I don't think there's any pinging behavior. Did somebody message you? Did you just happen to read it? Do you have an eldritch curse that summons you when called by name?
- throwaway314155 1y agoNot who you're asking for, but generally I think it's just a case of the author also being an HN regular. Although, I suppose you could set up some Google Alerts for mentions of your blog posts.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agoSomebody subscribed to my blog with ref to hacker news so i just poked my head in :-)
- shawn_w 1y agoOnce upon a time there was a guy who went by Kibo who would search Usenet feeds for posts mentioning his username and reply to them...
- qrush 1y agoRIP 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.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agoi've interviewed 100 folks in this space, in part because they are older than us.
- pstuart 1y agoThis 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....
- ahazred8ta 1y agoComputer science is such a young field that we can still sit at the feet of the giants whose shoulders we stand on.
- hyperhello 1y agoAnd that’s a wonderful lesson to try searching alternate spellings of names for an oral history.
- dado3212 1y agoDid 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.
- qingcharles 1y agoVery often these people are so humble and so amazed to find that anyone cares so much about some little project they did. I've brought some people to comic cons and they have been blown away by the fans they never knew they had. (and they always have fascinating industry stories to tell)
- OisinMoran 1y agoIf 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!
- hellojohnbuck 1y agoThanks oisin, it's a beautiful story and his ex-wife gave me permission to share.
- isoprophlex 1y agoIt is, indeed. Thanks for writing that up, it touched me. And thanks for being the historian of our culture-that-eschews culture (or so it seems to me sometimes, that tech tries to exist in a perennial present without acknowledging it's roots and history)
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks isoprophlex for the acknowledgment. so many of the folks that i have interviewed, contributed so much to making tech or a product better for all. especially at or around apple. they receieved none of the credit that the 'names' got. ;-) you know who i mean.
- daniel_reetz 1y agoA huge number of us labor behind the scenes with no public acknowledgment or credit. For each idea brought to life we might hope for -at most- an epitaph carved in expired patent claims. This story is touching.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks daniel. i swapped a few emails with stephen's ex-wife and they melted my heart. i asked if she was OK with sharing this story of a humble genius with the wider world and she said, yes.
- 1y ago
- nullhole 1y agoDon'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.io/content/dam/udp/en/open/standards/tiff/TIFF6.pdf 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
- adzm 1y agoAnd here is the author himself confirming that in the Wikipedia talk page for TIFF! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:TIFF/Archive_1#h-Source_for_the_42_thing?-2007-03-26T00:44:00.000Z https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:TIFF/Archive_1#h-Source_f...
- Tempat1 1y agoGreat find! And oh no, it’s complete with the customary blissfully unaware user replying to say he’s wrong!
- rzzzt 1y agoAre talk pages accepted as a source for the same article?
- speedgoose 1y agoTalk pages aren’t valid sources in general. In this case the author is dead and an established expert having published in the field, so I guess it’s fine, but I wouldn’t bet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-published_sources_(online_and_paper) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
- darkwater 1y agoHindsight is 20/20 and I loved TFA and I don't want to ruin it but... that comment was there from 2007 and the Wikipedia user bio was pretty clear since the beginning (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scarlsen&oldid=160291977 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Scarlsen&old...)
- gnerd00 1y agoTIFF 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
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks gnerd
- Upvoter33 1y agoBeautiful and moving. Thank you author of the article and thank you Mr TIFF
- adzm 1y agoI was not expecting the emotional ending. Really well done.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks upvoter
- myth_drannon 1y agoGlad 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.
- qingcharles 1y agoI think of all the content we've lost already. MySpace files are lost. Friendster archives are gone. So many YouTube videos lost to time.
- oidar 1y agoAnd Geocities, Vine, Google+, Anglefire, Tripod, Xoom, Homestead, Lycos communities, AOL Hometown, MSN Groups, 50megs.com, etc, etc.... not to mention small specialty sites like em411.com. All that content/history, just poof.
- qingcharles 1y agoThey found the Vine archives recently. Doesn't mean they'll get uploaded as Musk wants the new Vine to just be AI waifus. But the files still exist on a disk or tape somewhere. I just remembered Orkut. Though I suspect Google has backups or Orkut and Google+ somewhere. I wonder if Yahoo Answers is still on a tape somewhere?
- portaouflop 1y agoI link to a lot of stuff on my personal website and every month i check the links. About a dozen or so are dead every month, many on YouTube too. I now adopted the practice of recovering the texts I deem worthy from way back machine and downloading all yt videos I really like locally. But ofc one day I’ll also hit the bucket; still have to work out a contingency plan for my archive for that …
- defrost 1y agoI 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).
- andrehacker 1y agoAm 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 https://books.by/john-buck?ref=inventingthefuture.ghost.io
- hellojohnbuck 1y agohi andre, thanks for the feedback. there is a url link within the article to the book which uses a new self publishing method called books.by
- andrehacker 1y agoAh, I see, okay. Based on the quality of the article, the subject matter of the book being right in the center of my wheelhouse and the references I could find on the internet, I just ordered a copy (apparently a paper copy), look forward reading it.
- OisinMoran 1y agoI had a similar issue, clicking the author's name gets you to a decent page, but yeah I'd actually prefer if he made it a bit easier to buy the book! I'll have to get it now after such a nice article
- hellojohnbuck 1y agoi didn't want to push the book too hard, given the tone of the story. thanks for the feedback.
- OisinMoran 1y ago
- scriptweaver 1y agoIt’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.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks for the positive vibes scriptweaver
- kuil009 1y ago눈물나게 감동적이었습니다.
- Timwi 1y agoTranslation: “It was so moving that I cried.”
- tianshuo 1y agoThank you John Buck for this article, it is so interesting to read how something so common was invented. RIP Mr Tiff
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothank you
- lanyard-textile 1y ago:) Pleased to see the wikipedia change landed without drama. It’s still there as of writing.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agoi crossed my fingers for the first 24 hours but i now think admins and mod, to their credit, understand it's the truth.
- DroneBetter 1y agothe article shows scans of the research reports listing only Carlsen as their author, you could have just linked to one in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page to support his sole inventorhood, right
- hellojohnbuck 1y agoper: the scans, the patent isn't for TIFF and the articles misspell his name. I think that the Paul Brainerd (Aldus cofounder) interview with the Computer History Museum, when he names Stephen, will be sufficient for Wiki.
- Nio1024 1y agoRespect 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?
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- burnto 1y agoBeautiful essay. So much of the tech we use today originates from quiet humble builders and creators like Mr TIFF.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks for the response burnto
- csar 1y agoMe: “This link can’t possibly be about what I think it might be about.” Me, seconds later: “Yes it is!!”
- jack1243star 1y agoPlease 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?
- hellojohnbuck 1y agomy kids made the avatar so...sorry if it triggers
- jack1243star 1y agoI understand, and I apologize for the rant. Thank you for all the efforts that went into preserving the memories of those that built the world around us.
- 4ndrewl 1y agoThe 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!
- sllabres 1y agoAnd the (early) availability of well made library, LibTIFF by Sam Leffler. I used it extensively from 1995 on, but only found out that according to Wikipedia is dates back to 1988!
- flomo 1y agoPerhaps the greatest thing about TIFF, but also the most horrible things, and probably why TIFF is mostly historical. It was so extendable that no two programs ever accepted the exact same TIFF extensions. (omitting the war story) edit: forgot about byte order...
- yread 1y agoBut most of these variations were part of the spec (endianness with II or MM, later magic 43 for bigTIFF 64bit extension). I work with tiff and tiff-derived formats in digital microscopy where its very much not historical. And the alternatives (DICOM supp 145, vendor-specific garbage ... and thats it) are worse. I quite like the format, the only thing I would change is to have the option not to store directory information in a linked list spread throughout the file but in a simple array. Duplicate it at the beginning and end of the file and you've got resilience too (important in the age of floppies)
- piltboy 1y agoTIFF is still very much alive in certain circles, see for example https://cogeo.org/ https://cogeo.org/ The format is basically a TIFF file with attached georeferencing information and with the data organized by geographical sector, enabling fast downloads of regional subsets.
- TacticalCoder 1y agoBack 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuarkXPress [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_InDesign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_InDesign [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_drive
- flancian 1y agoI 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? Is there an explanation for this that I missed? Was it an Easter Egg left by the author?
- mananaysiempre 1y agoJust as a side note, there are two versions of tiff6.pdf (titled “TIFF, Revision 6.0, Final — June 3, 1992”) on the ’net: one[1] that mentions Aldus on the title page and one[2] that mentions Adobe. Only the Aldus one has the invisitext. (Curiously, the metadata says it’s newer.) [1] SHA256: dbcdf729182937ecff415dfd06806894bf03bfd741291aa3ad7ba45335673def, modify date 2002-05-10, created by Acrobat Distiller 4.05 for Windows, e.g. https://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/com16/tiff-fx/docs/tiff6.pdf https://www.itu.int/itudoc/itu-t/com16/tiff-fx/docs/tiff6.pd... [2] SHA256: 8cb1e1a2226e423ba8b88f57366a30ef1b7ad6109443ebdda072b952739a8d76, modify date 1995-09-14, created by Acrobat Distiller 2.1 for Power Macintosh, e.g. https://download.osgeo.org/libtiff/doc/TIFF6.pdf https://download.osgeo.org/libtiff/doc/TIFF6.pdf
- EvanAnderson 1y agoI've found a number of hidden items in PDFs masked in the same way. The one that comes to mind immediately are Dell product code names hiding in official spec PDFs. (The PowerConnect 6200-series switches are "Kinnick", for example.) I always assumed it was a lazy redaction method and people weren't necessarily aware the text wasn't actually redacted.
- tyg13 1y agoDepends on what format you view it in. For the printed version of the spec, it's sufficient ;)
- b2ccb2 1y agoHis obituary is lovely: https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlsen/obituary https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlse...
- throw0101d 1y ago[…] “Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like bananas.” “What’s the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? 42.”
- andrepd 1y agoSillepses are always great.
- quitit 1y agoQuietly thankful that the spec author didn't proclaim that we've been mispronouncing "TIFF" all these years.
- BigTTYGothGF 1y agoThe "TI" is really "Tl" and is a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate.
- quitit 1y agoI tried to pronounce it, but summoned a daemon instead
- throw0101d 1y agoTIL: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_affricate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_aff...
- sethx 1y agoBeautiful
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothank you sethx
- emmett013 1y agoI see you played the NYT Connections on 11/4.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- cod1r 1y agoOh man, this is a really nice ending to his story. I'm glad this happened.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks for the feedback
- noisy_boy 1y agoI 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.
- echelon_musk 1y agoI'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=vector#The_TIFF_Exploit https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/PSP/Homebrew_History?useskin=v...
- everydayentropy 1y agoNice read. It was touching and it's great that credit is given where credit is due now.
- kilibe 1y agoJohn, 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?
- hellojohnbuck 1y agohi kilibe, thanks for your interest. i have concentrated on apple in the era when jobs isn't there to cancel or squash ideas and invention. many folks, not unlike stephen, come out of the woodwork. and i have slowly connected with them. last week i documented (through interviews) tom gilley's work on apple's first hand-held pen-driven tablet called scribe. this included innovation and invention of suppressing electro mmagnetic interference, removng contemporary tech's weight, stretching battery output and so forth - as well as writing a slimmed down version of the mac/os and handwriting recognition rather than writing one completely from scratch (which was what newton/dylan) were doing. so there's a lot of conversations to document.
- hellojohnbuck 1y agoi do like the 'lighting up the lamps'
- yannpellegrini 1y agoThanks for researching this, I updated the french wiki page based on your work
- hellojohnbuck 1y agothanks for the positive vibes yann, that's a nice touch