Stephen Wilhite, who led the GIF creation team in the 1980s, died on March 14, 2022 of COVID-19. According to his wife Kathaleen, Wilhite died at the age of 74 and was surrounded by his closest family.
Wilhite created the Graphics Interchange Format or GIF while working at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired in the early 2000s and spent his retirement traveling, camping, and building model trains.
While GIF is currently synonymous with moving images and memes, that's not the reason why Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced GIF in 1987 to make color images more optimized and easy to download when internet speeds were still very slow.
"He created the GIF himself -- he actually made it at home and brought it to the office after perfecting it," Kathaleen said, as quoted from The Verge, Friday (25/3/2022).
"He'll figure it all out himself in his head and then go to great lengths to program it on the computer."
Wilhite's creation still continues to create controversy because until now there is still no agreement on how to name GIFs. Many mention using a hard G (like a guppy), but many pronounce it as 'jif' using a soft G (like a giraffe).
Wilhite as the creator of course has an absolute answer. In an interview with The New York Times in 2013, he said that GIFs should be pronounced with a soft G.
"The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It uses a soft 'G', pronounced 'jif'. End of story," said Wilhite.
Wilhite later confirmed his answer when he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Webby in the same year. Without saying a word, Wilshite accepted the award in a short video that can be seen below.
In an interview with the New York Times, Wilhite revealed that one of his favorite GIFs was the 'dancing baby' meme which went viral in 1996. The GIF was widely used by internet users long before the concept of memes and viral was born.
Several messages from former colleagues in his obituary said that Wilhite made many other contributions during his time at CompuServe, and referred to him as a hard worker who greatly influenced the company's success.
Goodbye Stephen Wilhite, without your creation internet culture might not be what it is today.