Stephen Wilhite has passed away. He developed the gif format in the 1980s. It has become the most popular medium for memes.
We owe a lot to Stephen Wilhite. Without him, the Internet would never have been such a fun place. This man is none other than the inventor of Graphics Interchange Format images — GIFs. With the American media, his wife has just confirmed, on March 24, 2022, his death. He died at the age of 74, from the consequences of the covid.
Stephen Wilhite began to develop this format in the 1980s, when he worked in the computer company CompuServe, leader at the time. ” He invented the GIF on his own — he actually made it at home and brought it to work after perfecting it “, entrusts his wife to the American media The Verge. ” He imagined everything privately in his head, then proceeded to program it on the computer. »
When the GIF format succeeded in 1987 thanks to Stephen Wilhite and his team, it was then a question of developing a format compatible with a very slow Internet network, but capable despite everything of carrying high resolution and color images. It was a reference image format before the arrival of PNG (Portable Network Graphics), which has since been able to carry images of much better quality.
Gradually, in the early 2000s, the GIF became the medium for the memes that we know today on social networks. However, it has other uses, such as for example in the field of popular science, to carry animations.
We say “jif”, no debate
Have you never known how to pronounce “gif”? It is time, in honor of Stephen Wilhite, to address this problem: its inventor explained in 2013 in the New York Times that the gif is pronounced “jif”, and not “guif”. Here is.
During this same interview, he also shared his favorite gif: that of a baby dancing. We can’t say that this is a particularly well-known meme these days, but it is precisely that: this gif went viral, in the beginnings of the internet, even before the culture of memes. It was, for Stephen Wilhite, the symbol of the beginnings of the gif on the web.
Editor’s favorite gifs
We all have our favorite gifs inscribed in us, which we like to draw in our Messenger conversations or on Twitter. Many are from cult memes. Here is a small selection from the editorial staff.
