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.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/PSP/Homebrew_History?useskin=v...
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).
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://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 filehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Scarlsen
Turns out the answer was on Wikipedia already :).
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!
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
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?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.
It's weird to see times one has lived through presented as ancient history....
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?
>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)
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.
[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
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.
[1]https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlse...
- 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)
edit: forgot about byte order...
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)
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!
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 …
Thank you for all the efforts that went into preserving the memories of those that built the world around us.
This story is touching.
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)
[…]
“Time flies like the wind.
Fruit flies like bananas.”
“What’s the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? 42.”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability#Self-p...
> Primary sources that have been reputably published may be used in Wikipedia, but only with care
and I imagine a Wikipedia edit summary does not count as a reliable source. (For one thing, despite it being very plausible that the Wikipedia user Scarlsen who signed himself as Stephen E Carlsen is indeed that person—I believe it completely!—it cannot be guaranteed that it wasn't an impostor, for example.)
Of course, if he was still alive he could have written a blog post or something like that and use that as a source, much like how it's likely this blog post will be used as a source for things surrounding the format and person.
I wrote a program processing GeoTIFF data. When I had started this project I chose GeoTIFF mostly b/c i wanted something simple. And I could load them in to Java's BufferImage class and manipulate them that way. But it seems all the pros exclusively use NetCDF and GeoTiffs are for noobs (working with atmospheric science data here)
GeoTIFF does extend "images" to cover more usecases, but a lot of stuff doesn't fit (like say a wind vector) and then you need some other container or metadata b/c you generally have many images. So I get the sense the complexity just ends up being moved elsewhere.
I’ve been using both TIFF and DNG this very week in my work (https://filmlabapp.com), so I was happy to read this post and learn about Steve Carlsen aka Mr. TIFF, whose work we’re still building on 39 years later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research
Edit: from the other comment, it appears it was in fact random...
"The answer to this is very simple. It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story." from the man himself[1]
...but let us not ruin a good story with the truth. Remember why earth was built. The "real" answer might then be flowing in the ether.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27...
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 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?
For forecast and climatological data I find NetCDF is vastly superior, but also much more complicated to work with due to the capabilities and how open the format is. Just have a look at the complexity of the CF Conventions to see what I mean: https://cfconventions.org/cf-conventions/release/v1.12.0/cf-...
For visualizing orthophotos and the like, I would choose GeoTIFF any day of the week, as they're easy to visualize across platforms using existing libraries. Using COGs you also get the functionality of a spatial index within each GeoTIFF file, meaning that you can stream subsets of GeoTIFF files without having to scan through the entire file for each request.
(Very few visitors to a Wikipedia page read its talk page, very few of them will further look at the archives of the talk page, let alone read every single comment and its corresponding commenter's name, and in this case as soon as the author knew the spelling to look for, the rest was straightforward for them.)
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.
I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The 'as-close-to-possible' truth of invention by individuals or teams meant identifying the work, educating myself, writing questions, and sending emails. And after that process, I set up a chat because it all gets down to talking to someone on the other side of the world, about something that happened 30 or 40 years ago.
If the invention involves a team, I try to interview more than one person, so I can cross-check the facts. Not to call anyone out, it’s just that, given time, we all forget the facts. And everyone adds their personal take. It’s because of that, for example, that I know the English musician Peter Gabriel really did visit Apple's research labs as they tested the Apple Sound Chip, and gave the team his personal approval to use the song 'Red Rain' for the Macintosh II launch. Wil Oxford, Steve Perlman, Mike Potel, Mark Lentczner and Steve Milne told me so.
As I was wrapping up Version 2.3 of Inventing the Future, I spoke with Steve M and Mark about the AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) audio standard that they built around the same time as their VIP visit. They did so as professional programmers, amateur musicians and electronic music experts. Milne and Lentczner knew users needed a standard file format to make their work lives easier and to fend off confusion in the nascent MIDI marketplace. But it didn't exist. So Steve and Mark consulted with users and manufacturers in the Apple cafeteria after hours. This work is interesting on its own but it also underpinned other research. The AIFF, Apple Sound Chip, and MIDI Manager work scaffolded QuickTime and its extensible video formats and programs in 1991. Senior engineer Toby Farrand told me:
Audio drove the development of QuickTime more than anything.
So who or what drove the development of AIFF?
Steve and Mark referred me to the IFF (Interchange File Format (IFF) and the TIFF (Tag Image File Format) that were built before AIFF, in 1985 and 1986 respectively. These file formats were the benchmark for open media standards. My search pivoted, as it always does, to understand those inventions. I expected to be able to find the engineer or engineers names, track them down and interview them. It has worked around 100 times before.
Jerry Morrison created IFF while working at Electronic Arts and then went to Apple, where he liaised with the AIFF team. I could easily background his work.

So I turned my attention to TIFF, built initially as an image standard for desktop publishing. TIFF was able to store monochrome, grayscale, and color images, alongside metadata such as size, compression algorithms, and color space information. In many ways, it was a lot like AIFF so I was keen to know more. But I couldn't find a TIFF creator. No matter how I enquired, Aldus created TIFF.
To be clear, while a search for AIFF will offer up a company (Apple) not a person, I was able to find Milne and Lentczner in part because of their unique names and because Apple publicised the AIFF work and those publications are archived.
All I had was Aldus, an American company that created desktop publishing with the help of Apple and Adobe. In fact, Paul Brainerd, the cofounder of Aldus coined the term 'desktop publishing' to quickly explain the technicality of what they were doing to potential investors. But Aldus and their seminal product, PageMaker, are long gone, and there were no breadcrumbs for TIFF's creation.
Finally, after a day-long trawl through MacWeek back issues, I found Steve Carlson. (below)

Then I ran a similar length search through the Computer History Museum’s amazing Oral Histories transcriptions. Brainerd mentioned Carlson's name in an interview. (below)

But it was too brief an explanation so I kept looking. Then the trail went cold.
And that was because, folks had misspelt his name when quoting him and then that was copied into magazines, and reviews and so forth. Brainerd's CHM interview transcript was wrong. But I didn’t know that.
I just kept looking for Steve Carlson.
I found other inventors because they had unique middle or last names or by random methods such as searching glider pilot licences in the Napa Valley after a tip from a former colleague that 'so and so' was a pilot in retirement. I had no tips, no links, nothing.
Why couldn’t I find Steve Carlson?
All the while, the answer was right under my nose. 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?
See below where I have highlighted the region with a blue block over the text.

For a reason I can’t recall, I downloaded a plain text version and typed in Carlson to see if he was mentioned, but I must have paused at ‘Carls...' and the search functionality automatically filled in the rest. Suddenly I was staring at:
Author/Editor/Arbitrator: Steve Carlsen.
‘Carls-EN’
A quick trip to Google patents, and a search for Steve Carlsen, Stephen Carlsen. Bingo! Stephen E. Carlsen’s patents at Aldus (and Adobe) in Issaquah, WA.

I checked the geography, as most folks of a certain age do not stray far from the addresses filed in their patents, and typed Stephen’s correctly spelled surname into the online US White Pages for Washington State. There was ‘a’ Stephen Carlsen listed in a retirement village in WA. His age matched, but there were no public facing email addresses.
I searched bulletin boards on the topic of TIFF, as I had found a former Apple engineer that way. Don had picked an abbreviation of his initials and numbers to post on BBS in his college days and then carried that same combination into adulthood. Many of us did. I took a punt pasting his unique prefix into hotmail, gmail etc. and found Don and interviewed him, but - Stephen Carlsen did not show up in a BBS. So, no email to try.
My ‘last straw' method for finding someone is a stamped envelope. I wrote, printed and mailed a one-page letter to Stephen's listed address, and crossed my fingers. Four months later he popped up in my email.
It was a surprise and a relief. We swapped a few emails, and he confirmed the TIFF catalyst story. For Stephen it was 'no big deal'. Once he had built the initial TIFF, Aldus needed to convince 3rd party developers and scanner manufacturers to agree to TIFF as a standard.
“We had to define and promote an industry standard for storing and processing scanned images, so that we wouldn't have to write import filters for every model of every scanner that would soon be entering the budding desktop scanner market."
Stephen himself did much of the evangelizing as Paul Brainerd later pointed out:
“(Steve) developed the standard, and then we went out and promoted it in a series of meetings with specific companies - as well as some workshops we ran in Seattle and the Bay Area during the Seybold shows and the MacWorld shows.”
I sent Stephen a draft of what I had written and he sent a prompt reply saying - ‘Looks good’.
I followed up asking him how he ended up at a tiny startup in Seattle called Aldus.
At that time, I was interviewing for a graphics position at Boeing Computer Services in Seattle, and noticed a small wanted ad that sounded really interesting, and seemed to be an excellent match for my background and interests. I interviewed with Paul and the 5-person mostly-ex-Atex engineering team, and I was hired.
Out of curiosity I put Stephen's email address, now that I knew it, into a Duck Duck search and found him helping people online with TIFF queries long after Aldus had been acquired by Adobe. He also contributed to a Google Group called tiffcentral.
Having interviewed so many people across more than a decade, I’ve got pretty good at judging those who would like to talk or type, those who are verbose and those that are not. I knew Stephen had said what he was going to say. I added his pioneering work on TIFF to the AIFF story and moved on.
Two years had flown by when I received an email yesterday. His ex-wife Peggy found my paper letter and wrote to me. Stephen passed away earlier this year.
Thank you for your interest in and support of Stephen’s brilliant work creating TIFF. I’m not surprised Stephen didn’t finish corresponding with you, as he had begun to struggle with using his computer and phone. Some days were better than others for him, but he began to lose touch with people during those months you were reaching out to him. He was a humble man, and I guess never pushed to be recognized, although I believe those who worked with him knew the truth. His last week was in my home, where he was never left alone.
Peggy finished the email with, ‘I called him Mr TIFF up to his last moment.'
The 10,000+ hours of book research disappeared in an instant. As sad as it was, I could see clearly that all of my work was worth it. Every single second. Because of this email.
Mr TIFF.
Last night, as everyone in my house went to sleep, I took a deep breath and edited the Wikipedia page for TIFF, the Tag Image File Format.
It no longer reads ‘created by Aldus’, it reads ‘…created by Stephen Carlsen, an engineer at Aldus'

"Inventing the Future" here -> https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
You should listen to Nathan Carlsen's “Inquisitive Pontification” podcast:

This page [0] still links to (when clicking the main image) an oddish seeming corner of your site that mentions purchasing the book but has no link to it
Seemed easier to let users preprocess their NetCDFs into GeoTIFFs manually. I have a bunch of hacky scripts to massage NetCDFs from different sources in to compatible GeoTIFFs
> meaning that you can stream subsets of GeoTIFF files without having to scan through the entire file for each request.
Interesting. My performance bottleneck right now is the user selects a small regions and then the program has to read in GBs of global precipitation maps (from IMERG) and cut out tiny squares. In the extreme cases it can mean ~2 minutes of waiting for a result. This means the user can't casually select and try out different regions with quick feedback. If you have a beefy machine you can keep it all in RAM sometimes and it works better.. but it's not ideal (my 16GB machine can only handle simpler scenarios)
I'll take a closer look at in the future. At the moment I just use Java's default TIFF reader and ImageBuffer class. Maybe it'd be easy to convert to COG format and adapt in a COG reader
We are humans, everybody can miss things, I mentioned "hindsight is 20/20" but still, it was in the Wikipedia discussion page for the TIFF article all the time. It's a matter of fact and some random HNer found it in minutes/hours.
I repeat myself, it was probably better that he didn't found that out and went to write a hand-written letter to the alleged author's home address, it created a much deeper human bond, which is especially meaningful since Stephen Carlsen passed away not much later.