Stephen Wilhite, one of the main inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID, at the age of 74. According to his wife, Kathaleen, he was with his family when he died. In their final farewell, his loved ones said, "Despite his achievements, he remained a very humble, kind and good person."
See also: Create GIFs from anything on a Samsung Galaxy phone
Stephen Wilhite worked on GIFs, or Graphics Interchange Formats, which are now very popular on social media, in messages, etc. It all started while he was working at CompuServe in the 1980s . He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.
Today, GIFs are synonymous with animated memes on the Internet, but that wasn’t why Stephen Wilhite created the image format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” with color, at a time when Internet speeds were abysmal compared to today. “Heinvented the GIF himself—he actually did it at home and brought it to work after he perfected it,” Kathaleen said. “He would think of everything himself, in his head, and then go and make it on the computer.”
See also: How to insert a GIF into a Microsoft Word document
There have been disputes over the pronunciation of the image format over the years. Stephen Wilhite was very clear about how GIF was pronounced. In 2013, he told the New York Times, "The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They're WRONG. It's a soft "G," pronounced "jif." That's it."
Stephen Wilhite GIF: Award
That same month, he received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing the GIF. "After 25 years, they finally honored this achievement that he made," his wife said, adding that creating the GIF was the thing he was most proud of.
Former colleagues have said that Stephen Wilhite was not just the inventor of the GIF. He also contributed significantly to many other projects during his time at CompuServe. Colleagues described him as a hard worker who was largely responsible for the company's success.
See also: Top 5 Gif Creation Tools for 2021 for easy gif creation!
Many users decided to honor him on Twitter in the most appropriate way: GIFs
Source: The Verge
