The Internet Honors the Late Stephen Wilhite, Creator of the GIF

Stephen Wilhite, father of the GIF, has passed away. He was 74 years old. It's impossible to imagine an internet without GIFs. By the time the World Wide Web became publicly available in 1993, GIF was already established as a popular image format because of its LZW data compression, which gave color images portability between software applications. Because they emerged around the same time, the GIF and the internet shaped each other throughout the 90s. The look of the internet would have turned out pretty different if it wasn't for Stephen Wilhite and his Graphics Interchange Format. Wilhite's obituary mentions that "even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man."

Although GIFs aren't quite as ubiquitous as they once were, the format is still widespread on Twitter, where people often use GIFs as humorous reaction memes. We thought it would be appropriate to share Twitter's best GIF reactions to the news of Wilhite's passing. Oh, and in case you were wondering, it's pronounced GIF.

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  • Steve Wilhite's team at CompuServe introduced the first GIF ever on June 15, 1987. The original GIF illustrated a simple 8 bit airplane that appeared to be moving against animated clouds. The “Graphics Interchange Format” was revolutionary at the time, because it allowed images to be relatively lightweight without losing too much quality, making it possible to load quickly and add color to the web. By the aughts, GIFs made up the whole aesthetic of the internet. 

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