Stephen “Steve” Wilhite American computer scientist and one of the main creators of the GIF, died last week of Covid at the age of 74. The “.GIF” files constitute a digital graphic format used on the web and chats such as WhatsApp, both for images and short videos, although its most widespread use is for short animations.
“He was surrounded by family when he passed away. His obituary page notes that even with all of his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man,” they explained in The Verge.
Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, now used for reactions, messages and jokes, while working on CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired in the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.
The information was confirmed by his wife Kathaleen to the specialized media The Verge.
what is a gif
Netscape Navigator, the most widely used browser before IE, popularized the format. Photo Wikipedia Commons
most users use gifs in chats like WhatsApp: animated stickers are just that.
Its name comes from Graphics Interchange Format (in Spanish, Graphics Interchange Format) and was created by CompuServe, an American communications company, in 1987. The goal was to get a color video format to its file download areas, to replace to its previous black and white format, called RLE.
In this way, GIF became very popular because it could use a more efficient compression algorithm than the RLE algorithm used by PCX and MacPaint formats. This meant that large images could be downloaded in a reasonable period of time, at a time when modems to connect to the Internet they were much slower.
GIFs became widespread thanks to the Netscape browser that allowed them to be viewed. For many experts, in fact, if Netscape had not integrated GIFs, they would probably have died in 1998: it was in that year that CompuServe was bought by AOL and the patent on them expired, so the format was released for the general public. .
Flash was another tool that popularized them, well into the 2000s.
The funny thing is that Wilhite created the format beyond current usage. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color at a time when Internet speeds were slower than they are today.
Steve Wilhite: his career
“He invented the GIF himself; he actually made it at home and brought it to work after he perfected it,” Kathaleen, his wife, told The Verge. “He would figure everything out privately in his head and then go into town to program it into the computer,” she added.
As reconstructed by The Verge, several messages from former colleagues on his obituary page said that Stephen also made other significant contributions during his time at CompuServe, and spoke of a hard worker who had a huge influence on the company’s success.
Also, one of his hobbies is building model trains. “When we built the house, we actually had an entire section of the basement for his train room. He always did the layouts and the electrical work for the layout,” said Kathaleen.
In the Times interview, Wilhite said that one of his favorite GIFs is the dancing baby meme, which went viral before the terms “memes” and “going viral” were widely used terms.
How to pronounce GIF: jig or guif?
One last fact: the correct pronunciation is not “gif”, but “jif”. In 2013, Wilhite told The New York Times: “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. You are wrong. It’s a soft ‘G’, pronounced ‘jif’. End of story,” she sentenced.
Years later, when he received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for the invention of the GIF, he reaffirmed this idea.
In 2012, GIF became the word of the year being recognized by the Oxford dictionary.
For many, it will still be pronounced “gif”.