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Mr TIFF

Mr TIFF

inventingthefuture.ghost.io1052 pointsby speckx150 comments

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  • 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.

    by noisy_boy
  • 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

    by andrehacker
  • 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).

    by defrost
  • His obituary is lovely: https://www.mountainviewtacoma.com/obituaries/stephen-carlse...
    by b2ccb2
  • 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!

    by 4ndrewl
  • 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 :).

    by lookingdesk
  • 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!
    by OisinMoran
  • 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
    by nullhole

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