Stephen Wilhite, one of the leading inventors of the GIF, died of COVID last week at the age of 74, according to his wife Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. When he died he was surrounded by his family. His obituary page states that “for all his achievements, he has remained a very humble, kind and good man.”
Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is used today for reactions, messages, and jokes, in the 1980s. He retired in the early 2000s, spending his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.
“It’s pronounced ‘jif’, not ‘gif’.”
Although GIFs are now synonymous with animated internet memes, that wasn’t why Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color at a time when Internet speeds were freezing compared to today. “He invented GIF all by himself — he actually made this at home and brought it to work after perfecting it,” Kathaleen said. “He would figure it all out privately in his head and then go to town to program it on the computer.”
If you want to delve deeper into the history of the GIF, the Daily Dot provides a good explanation of how the format became an internet phenomenon.
While there has long been debate about the correct pronunciation of the image format, Wilhite was very clear on how he wanted to say it. In 2013 he told the New York Times: “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. You are wrong. It’s a soft “G”, pronounced “jif”. End of the story.”
He reinforced that stance later that month when he accepted a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing the GIF and used animation to deliver his acceptance speech. (You can watch the full clip of him receiving the award here.) “After 25 years, they finally recognized his achievement,” Kathaleen said, adding that making the GIF was what he was most proud of .
Several messages from former colleagues on his obituary page stated that Stephen made other important contributions during his time at CompuServe and described a hard worker who had a major impact on the company’s success.
After Stephen retired, the couple traveled together. Kathaleen said one of the most memorable trips was on their honeymoon when they visited the Grand Canyon. “I had never seen it before and he wanted to show me,” she said lovingly. The couple also went camping “all the time,” she said.
At home he enjoyed working on his model railway. “When we had the house built, we even had a whole section in the basement for his draft room. He always did the design and electrical work for the layout,” Kathaleen said.
In the Times interview, Wilhite said that one of his favorite GIFs is the dancing baby meme, which went viral before “memes” and “going viral” were common terms. So cheers to you, Mr. Wilhite. Thank you for creating the image format that made dial-up color image downloading bearable before it became one of the Internet’s own languages.
According to a 2013 interview, one of Wilhite’s favorite gifs. Gif about the New York Times