Stephen Wilhite, inventor of the meme-favorite GIF, has died
Source: Las Vegas Sun
Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the internet-popular short-video format, the GIF, has died. He was 74.
His wife, Kathaleen, said Thursday in a phone interview that he died of COVID on March 14.
Wilhite, who lived in Milford, Ohio, won a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF, which decades after its creation became omnipresent in memes and on social media, often used as a cheeky representation of a cultural moment.
Wilhite was working at CompuServe in 1987 when he invented the GIF. I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming, he told The New York Times in 2013, saying the first image was an airplane and insisting that the file had only one pronunciation - a soft G, like Jif peanut butter. Those using the hard G, as in got or given, are wrong, he said. End of story.
Read more: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2022/mar/24/stephen-wilhite-inventor-of-the-meme-favorite-gif/
Jacson6
(311 posts)I'm as old as the hills!
Skittles
(152,964 posts)that's.......it
Lithos
(26,397 posts)...
krispos42
(49,445 posts)Laha
(407 posts)I'd embed a jif, but I don't know how.
Deep State Witch
(10,350 posts)What a bad pun!
Jetheels
(991 posts)William Seger
(10,742 posts)Huh, even the inventor pronounced it wrong!
Jetheels
(991 posts)The pronunciation was an intentional nod to the peanut butter brand.
PatSeg
(46,804 posts)who determine the pronunciation, as is true with pretty much all words. Almost everyone I know pronounces it with a hard "g".
William Seger
(10,742 posts)LudwigPastorius
(8,944 posts)2naSalit
(86,054 posts)Smilie guy of the 21st century.
ancianita
(35,812 posts)RIP
hunter
(38,264 posts)Technically you had to pay a license fee to UNISYS for the software required to encode and decode GIFS. Most people ignored these restrictions. The larger software producers, including Microsoft, paid for valid licences.
The free and open source PNG image format was developed in response to these onerous restrictions. I remember Microsoft was slow to adopt the PNG format and when they did they used their own encoders and decoders which deviated slightly from the open source specs. They were probably trying to "embrace and extinguish" the open source version.
By 2004 all the GIF patents had expired so that anyone could use the GIF format.
Mostly I remember how painful it was to view gifs, especially aninmated gifs, on a slow dial-up internet connection. Our phone line didn't even support 56K. I usually surfed the web using Opera with the images turned off. I'd only load images I thought would be interesting.
Later we got higher speed internet from a local provider. This was before Comcast or Pacific Bell even offered residential internet service in our area. Viewing static gifs and other images became much less irritating. Of course by then people were beginning to post huge animated gifs and other moving pictures which I routinely blocked.
Rocknation
(44,555 posts)Last edited Sat Jan 13, 2024, 10:03 AM - Edit history (18)
I will be grateful to Stephen Wilhite from now on.
GIFs from my Web server space that I "fostered" in DU posts that got "adopted" as official DU smileys (the last one within 18 hours):
Rocknation