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!
>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)
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?
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 ?
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
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?
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...
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)
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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!
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 :).
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?
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
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?
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...
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
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.
:) Pleased to see the wikipedia change landed without drama. It’s still there as of writing.
Thank you John Buck for this article, it is so interesting to read how something so common was invented. RIP Mr Tiff
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)
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).
And that’s a wonderful lesson to try searching alternate spellings of names for an oral history.
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
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.
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.
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