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.
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