Mr TIFF

[nullhole]

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

[adzm]

And 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_f...

[71bw]

42 even shows up in the late mr. Carlsen's obituary. [1]

[1]https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlse...

[antonis-gr]

42 is an extremely non-special number. Does anyone know if it appeared in the CS field before Douglas Addams "invented" it?

[Rygian]

Based on the same algorithm as https://xkcd.com/221/

[OisinMoran]

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!

[hellojohnbuck]

Thanks oisin, it's a beautiful story and his ex-wife gave me permission to share.

[lookingdesk]

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 :).

[svat]

Thanks! If you look at his (logged-in) edits on Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Scarlsen ), then apart from the lone comment on the talk page (about the reason for "42") and creating that user page, he has two edits to the TIFF article:

- one of them clarifies the (non-)involvement of Microsoft: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=TIFF&diff=prev&ol...

- and the other is even more interesting: though he is being scrupulous and removing a sentence that has no published citations, in his edit summary he confirms that it is basically true:

> The author of the original TIFF specification wanted TIFF to stand for "The Image File Format", but he was overruled by Aldus' president Paul Brainerd on the grounds that it sounded presumptuous.

(The edit summary says: Removed the "The Image File Format" sentence, since it only has eye-witness support (me, for one), but no published citatations)

[oidar]

His lone comment:

>Yes it is true: the second word of a TIFF file, 42, was indeed taken from the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, from Hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galaxy. StephenECarlsen 23:38, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

[adzm]

If anyone can contact John Buck this sounds like information he'd be interested in. Also an interesting avenue for future investigative work.

[4ndrewl]

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!

[flomo]

Perhaps 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...

[blacklion]

Unfortunately, it doesn't help.

Almost any digital camera RAW format is TIFF inside. And you can see how much kludges good metadata library needs to read all of them: offsets from the IFD, offsets from beginning of file with or without header, offsets from fields in IFD, etc, etc, etc. You take TIFF, you change header to make your format, and then you cannot implement this TIFF properly!

Even DNG (which is tiff inside) is mangled by camera firmware authors!

[sllabres]

And 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!

[hellojohnbuck]

Carlsen's TIFF extensibility was what Milne and Lentczner used as a guiding principal when building AIFF, as did Leak on QuickTime years later.

[b2ccb2]

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

[throw0101d]

    […]

    “Time flies like the wind.
    Fruit flies like bananas.”

    “What’s the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? 42.”

[defrost]

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).

[andrehacker]

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

[OisinMoran]

I 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]

hi 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

[noisy_boy]

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.

[gnerd00]

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

[hellojohnbuck]

thanks gnerd

[quitit]

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

[BigTTYGothGF]

The "TI" is really "Tl" and is a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate.

[qrush]

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.

[hellojohnbuck]

i've interviewed 100 folks in this space, in part because they are older than us.

[burnto]

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

[hellojohnbuck]

thanks for the response burnto

[lanyard-textile]

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

[hellojohnbuck]

i crossed my fingers for the first 24 hours but i now think admins and mod, to their credit, understand it's the truth.

[mikestorrent]

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

[ChrisMarshallNY]

I 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.

[echelon_musk]

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...

[flancian]

  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?

Is there an explanation for this that I missed? Was it an Easter Egg left by the author?

[mananaysiempre]

Just 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.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

[EvanAnderson]

I'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.

[Nio1024]

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?

[Upvoter33]

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

[adzm]

I was not expecting the emotional ending. Really well done.

[hellojohnbuck]

thanks upvoter

[righthand]

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.

[hellojohnbuck]

thanks 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.

[cod1r]

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

[hellojohnbuck]

thanks for the feedback