Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died

 

 

This month, Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the looping animated GIF image format, passed away.

 

Wilhite, one of America Online’s chief architects, died on March 14 — just days after his 74th birthday on March 3 — according to an obituary. His wife, Kathaleen, verified that he died of Covid.

Wilhite began his career as a programmer at Compuserve, the first significant commercial internet service provider.

 

He devised the Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, in 1987 while at Compuserve to compress pictures so that they could be accessed at early modem rates.

Years later, it became the dominant means of expressing emotion and memetic communication on social media. The GIF format has long been used to display graphs, drawings, and basic animations.

The format grew in popularity in the early 2010s. Wilhite’s GIF could convey a wide range of emotions, whether it was Jasmine Masters from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” saying “And I oop-” or Kermit the Frog drinking Lipton tea.

 

The Oxford American Dictionary named GIF word of the year in 2012, owing to its return in popularity among bloggers, particularly on Tumblr and other sites.

Many people have argued throughout the years on how to pronounce GIF. Wilhite finally put an end to the argument in 2013, announcing that it is pronounced with a soft “g,” akin to the Jif peanut butter brand. Some people still pronounce the term with a harsh “g.”

 

Wilhite received the Webby Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013 for his innovation and contribution to internet culture.

“It was a beautiful event in his life travelling to New York and earning that prize,” Kathaleen Wilhite said. “They should have recognized him a lot sooner,” she remarked.

In the early 2000s, he retired and spent his time camping and touring.

According to his obituary, Wilhite is left by his wife, four stepchildren, a son, 11 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren.