If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a GIF is worth millions. The image file format has been a defining element of internet culture for decades, with glass-raising DiCaprios and mic-dropping Obamas facilitating self-expression in a faceless digital world. And we have one man to thank for all the jokes, innuendo and praise: Stephen Wilhite, inventor of the gif, who died last week at the age of 74.
Wilhite, who lived in Milford, Ohio, contracted Covid two weeks before his death, his wife, Kathaleen Wilhite, told NPR.
Stephen Wilhite, a lifelong programmer, created the GIF in 1987 while working at CompuServe. The compressed image files were useful at a time when internet connections were sluggish. “If you want lossless, compressed graphics, there’s nothing like GIF,” Sandy Trevor, who led Wilhite’s team, told the Daily Dot in 2012.
Steve Wilhite attends the 2013 Webby Awards in New York. His wife, Kathaleen Wilhite, said creating the gif was his proudest achievement. Photo: Stephen Lovekin/Getty ImagesWilhite “invented the GIF all by himself — he actually made that at home and brought it to work after perfecting it,” Kathaleen Wilhite told The Verge. “He dreamed it all up privately in his head and then went to town to program it on the computer.” It was his proudest achievement, she said.
In the same year, an update introduced animated graphics. “I think the first GIF was a picture of an airplane. It’s been a long time,” Stephen Wilhite told the Daily Dot in 2012. In fact, according to Giphy, the go-to place for gif seekers, it was this image:
Wilhite worked for Compuserve until 2001 when he suffered a stroke. Meanwhile, the popularity of gifs increased, including on early social media sites like MySpace. In 1996, the picture of the “dancing baby” – one of Wilhite’s favorites, he told the New York Times – was posted on the Internet and attached to emails. In 2012, “gif” was named Word of the Year by Oxford American Dictionaries. The following year, the New York Times called the format “the aesthetic calling card of modern internet culture”.
The next year, Wilhite received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award. Called onto the stage, he maintained a poker face as he delivered an acceptance speech in an appropriate format:
Wilhite continued to code for the rest of his life. He was also passionate about model trains, Kathaleen Wilhite told NPR, and the couple were avid campers; he “loved to travel,” according to his obituary. Aside from his work and hobbies, “he was probably one of the kindest, humblest men you’ve ever met,” Kathaleen Wilhite told the radio station. “People loved him and respected his work and that would mean more to him than anything how they respected what he did … I miss him more than anyone can imagine.”
Tributes poured onto his obituary page. “You have transformed the way we entertain ourselves as a society and immortalized countless moments that would otherwise be fleeting,” wrote one well-wisher. “Thank you for helping the modern world take shape,” wrote another.
Giphy offered a tribute of its own, praising “the simplicity of the format, the power of the repeating image. We are indebted to Mr. Wilhite’s creativity and vision.”
For those who want to honor Wilhite’s memory themselves, there are many gifs that pay tribute to their inventor. Perhaps even better, you can heed his unequivocal advice: pronounce it “jif.”