GIF inventor dies aged 74

GIF inventor Steven Wilhite has died aged 74. Wilhite came up with the Graphics Interchange Format in the 1980s as an employee of CompuServe.

Wilhite developed GIF in his spare time and took the elaborated idea to work, writes The Verge. The standard for displaying images over the web exists since 1987. “GIF is CompuServe’s standard for defining colored raster images. This makes it possible to enable high-quality, high-resolution graphics on a variety of hardware and is intended as a mechanism for exchanging and displaying images,” the text reads.

The standard is now mainly known as a way to share moving, repetitive short videos. According to Wilhite, the standard had to be pronounced ‘djif’. er is a page online where internet users can leave condolences. Wilhite died of corona a week and a half ago at the age of 74.