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.

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

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 :).

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....

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

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 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).