GIF Inventor Stephen Wilhite Dies from COVID at 74

Stephen Wilhite, the father of the Graphics Interchange Format, mostly known as GIF, has died.

According to his wife, now widow, Kathaleen Wilhite, the renowned computer scientist died due to complications from COVID-19 on March 14; he passed away surrounded by his family, per The Verge.

He was 74 years old at the time of his death, leaving behind Kathaleen, his children, and grandchildren.

Stephen Wilhite's Creation of the GIF

According to Smithsonian Magazine, Stephen was an employee at CompuServe during the late 1980s.

At that time, space was an issue, so it was difficult to share a colored image file without taking too much of the computer's memory. It was during this point in time that Stephen led a team of developers to figure out how to compress images with minimal data loss, per Vox's article.

Wilhite and his team created a compression algorithm named Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW), combined with image parameters like the number of available colors to create a compressed image that did not lose much of its data during the process.

The LZW algorithm was named after its creators, Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch.

Kathaleen mentioned to the Huffington Post that Stephen worked at home to create the GIF and brought it to work after he perfected it. During that time, he would figure out everything privately in his head and then worked on its programming on the computer.

Stephen told The Daily Dot that while the first GIF was a picture of an airplane, his favorite was the infamous "dancing baby," which first appeared in 1996.

The Dancing Baby GIF, which was developed by Michael Girard and Robert Lyne, was of a baby in their diapers dancing in front of a black screen. It was made as a sample source file for the 3D animation software package Character Studio, per Ars Technica.

Memers of the late 2000s and early 2010s would remember the dancing baby as one of the first viral memes.

The GIFs of Today

Today, many a memer and content creator owe thanks to Stephen Wilhite due to the image format's ability to cater to animated images.

In fact, Twitter recently released a new feature that would allow iOS device users to create their GIFs using the app's built-in camera mode, per a separate iTech Post article.

Part of the reason the GIF survived the first few years of its life despite a few controversies surrounding it was due to it fitting the DIY spirit of the early internet. It was a small file that could be downloaded and stored on individual servers. It also does not have any competition to replace its animation style of short, continuous, and soundless loops.

Another reason for that was the onset of Social Media, which happened in the mid-2000s. Early social media platforms like Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr played a major role in pushing social media culture towards the use of GIFs for reactions and content.

Easy-to-use creation tools and virtual libraries that can cater to anyone's preferences have turned GIFs into valuable tools of expression and communication on the internet, which netted Wilhite a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Webby Awards for his contribution to the modern internet.

Wilhite also clarified at the awards that the pronunciation of GIF is with a soft g. It is not like saying "gift" without the t.

Simply put, GIF is pronounced "JIF," not "GIF."

Thank you, Stephen Wilhite, for the GIF(t) and your hard work.