What is your favorite GIF? Stephen Wilhite, creator of the format, dies at 74

Stephen Wilhiteone of the main inventors of the GIF or Graphics Interchange Format, He died on March 14 due to COVID-19, at the age of 74, according to his family. The obituary notes that he remained a “humble, kind and good” man.

Wilhite’s creation is now one of the favorites to share reactions, congratulations, jokes and especially memes on social networks. It was developed while the American computer scientist worked at the CompuServe company, in the 1990s. 80. He retired at the turn of the 21st century, but his invention took off.

But memes weren’t the reason Wilhite created the GIF. It was originally a way to distribute high-quality, high-resolution color imagesat a time when internet speeds were in the “ice age”.

“If you want compressed, lossless graphics, there’s nothing better than GIF,” said Sandy Trevor, the head of the CompuServe team Wilhite worked on. The first image was of a plane, apparently. But the one who gave him a boost to fame was the old netscape browserwhen it allowed the GIF format in its 1995 update, including animations.

Wilhite retired from CompuServe in the late 1990s due to a stroke. The company was acquired by AOL in 1998, which that same year let the GIF patent expireso the format became public domain.

Since then, the GIF has been on social media, starting with my spaceand was soon nourished by sequences of movies and TV serieswithout having to ask permission or infringe licenses or copyrights.

By the way, the doubt about how to pronounce the acronyms (guif or yif?) was dispelled in 2013, when Wilhite spoke with New York Times and established that the correct pronunciation is /yif/ (jif, in English). “End of story,” he noted then.

In case anyone had the desire to argue, Wilhite repeated it that same year during the ceremony in which he received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award (AND).