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'
