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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

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...

Hindsight 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&old...)

Great find! And oh no, it’s complete with the customary blissfully unaware user replying to say he’s wrong!

And interestingly, the person he replies to is taviso [0][1]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=taviso

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

(Also: 42 is the answer to everything because it's the ascii code for *).

Are talk pages accepted as a source for the same article?

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

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!

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

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 :).

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)

Ok so then we could technically edit it back in since he's a primary source, right?

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)

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

thanks adam

Hey 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?

Somebody subscribed to my blog with ref to hacker news so i just poked my head in :-)

Not 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.

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!

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...

But 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)

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!

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

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

Ah, 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.

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

i didn't want to push the book too hard, given the tone of the story. thanks for the feedback.

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.

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

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

thanks for the response burnto

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

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.

Threads 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...

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

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

thanks upvoter

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

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

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

the 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

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.

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.

Very 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)

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

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

thanks gnerd

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

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).

눈물나게 감동적이었습니다.

Translation: “It was so moving that I cried.”

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.

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.

Thank 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.

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....

Computer science is such a young field that we can still sit at the feet of the giants whose shoulders we stand on.

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.

I think of all the content we've lost already. MySpace files are lost. Friendster archives are gone. So many YouTube videos lost to time.

And 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.

They 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?

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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?

my kids made the avatar so...sorry if it triggers

I 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.