Mr Tiff

(inventingthefuture.ghost.io)

152 points | by speckx 3 hours ago ago

11 comments

  • nullhole 31 minutes ago

    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
  • lookingdesk an hour ago

    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 :).

  • Upvoter33 3 minutes ago

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

  • qrush 4 minutes ago

    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.

  • OisinMoran 33 minutes ago

    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!

  • mikestorrent an hour ago

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

  • hyperhello an hour ago

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

  • gnerd00 22 minutes ago

    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

  • dado3212 35 minutes ago

    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.

  • pstuart an hour ago

    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....

  • righthand 2 hours ago

    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.