Stephen Wilhite, inventor of the meme-favorite GIF, has died

[TexasTowelie]

Source: Las Vegas Sun

Stephen Wilhite, the inventor of the internet-popular short-video format, the GIF, has died. He was 74.

His wife, Kathaleen, said Thursday in a phone interview that he died of COVID on March 14.

Wilhite, who lived in Milford, Ohio, won a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF, which decades after its creation became omnipresent in memes and on social media, often used as a cheeky representation of a cultural moment.

Wilhite was working at CompuServe in 1987 when he invented the GIF. “I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming,” he told The New York Times in 2013, saying the first image was an airplane and insisting that the file had only one pronunciation - a soft “G,” like Jif peanut butter. Those using the hard “G,” as in “got” or “given,” “are wrong,” he said. “End of story.”

Read more: https://lasvegassun.com/news/2022/mar/24/stephen-wilhite-inventor-of-the-meme-favorite-gif/

[Jacson6]

1. I remember the GIF format when it came out in 1987.

I'm as old as the hills!

[Skittles]

4. I was mentally trying to remember how far back that went

that's.......it

[Lithos]

2. He is with jod

...

[krispos42]

3. Hard "g" or GTFO!

[Skittles]

5. !

[Demovictory9]

8. lol

[Laha]

12. I'm going to Jondor

I'd embed a jif, but I don't know how.

[Deep State Witch]

17. Gesus!

What a bad pun!

[Jetheels]

6. Choosy developers choose Gif

[William Seger]

11. So it's "Graphics Interchange Format" but pronounced like Giraffe Interchange Format?

Huh, even the inventor pronounced it wrong!

[Jetheels]

13. I guess the inventor gets to decide how it's pronounced.

The pronunciation was an intentional nod to the peanut butter brand.

[PatSeg]

14. But eventually it will be the users

who determine the pronunciation, as is true with pretty much all words. Almost everyone I know pronounces it with a hard "g".

[William Seger]

15. E.g. LINUX

[LudwigPastorius]

7. You, sir, have the thanks of a grateful internet.

[2naSalit]

9. He was kind of the...

Smilie guy of the 21st century.

[ancianita]

10. Thank you, sir.

RIP

[hunter]

16. There was a huge battle over patent rights as the GIF image format became popular.

Technically you had to pay a license fee to UNISYS for the software required to encode and decode GIFS. Most people ignored these restrictions. The larger software producers, including Microsoft, paid for valid licences.

The free and open source PNG image format was developed in response to these onerous restrictions. I remember Microsoft was slow to adopt the PNG format and when they did they used their own encoders and decoders which deviated slightly from the open source specs. They were probably trying to "embrace and extinguish" the open source version.

By 2004 all the GIF patents had expired so that anyone could use the GIF format.

Mostly I remember how painful it was to view gifs, especially aninmated gifs, on a slow dial-up internet connection. Our phone line didn't even support 56K. I usually surfed the web using Opera with the images turned off. I'd only load images I thought would be interesting.

Later we got higher speed internet from a local provider. This was before Comcast or Pacific Bell even offered residential internet service in our area. Viewing static gifs and other images became much less irritating. Of course by then people were beginning to post huge animated gifs and other moving pictures which I routinely blocked.

[Rocknation]

18. I don't always make GIFs. But when I do,

Last edited Fri May 8, 2026, 10:35 PM - Edit history (22)

I will be grateful to Stephen Wilhite from now on.










GIFs that I "fostered" in DU posts via my Web host that were "adopted" by DU as official smileys (the last one within 18 hours):





Rocknation