Anyone trying to save or copy an image on a computer has Stephen Wilhite to thank for the technology that makes it possible.
In 1987, several years before the advent of the World Wide Web, Wilhite created the gif. Standing for “graphics interchange format”, it enabled an image to be compressed without losing its sharpness and could be loaded swiftly and shared on any computer. “I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming,” he said.
The first gif was a frozen frame pixelated image of an aircraft soaring through a sky and although the file was not originally created for animation, Wilhite designed the format so that it could be stretched and extended to turn it into an animated medium.
The invention helped to shape the way we communicate as a society and became a universal language for conveying humour, frustration or sarcasm. It led to the millions of looping images seen everywhere on instant messaging apps and social media platforms, such as the celebrated “dancing baby”, which went viral in 1996 and was one of Wilhite’s personal favourites.
Other animated gifs that have become well-known pop culture memes include Homer Simpson retreating backward into a hedge to indicate embarrassment, Michael Jackson eating popcorn as an expression of excited anticipation and a tuxedo-clad Leonardo DiCaprio raising a champagne glass to convey congratulations. Some decried the infantilising impact of such images on the use of language. Most simply smiled at the wit of the wordless shorthand.
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By 2012 gifs had become so ubiquitous that The Oxford American Dictionary celebrated the 25th anniversary of Wilhite’s invention by declaring gif the word of the year. It called gifs “an image format which has entered a new vogue as a verb following its adoption by social networks”. The New York Times called the gif “the aesthetic calling card of modern internet culture”.
As gifs exploded over computer screens, tablets and smartphones the world over, a fierce debate followed about the correct pronunciation of the acronym, which the magazine Mother Jones described as “the most absurd religious war in geek history”.
As the first letter stood for “graphics”, a hard “g” seemed logical enough and the Oxford English Dictionary endorses both a soft and hard “g”. However, Wilhite insisted that the lexicologists were wrong and his intended pronunciation echoed the American peanut butter brand Jif. “It is a soft ‘g’, pronounced ‘jif’. End of story,” he said.
Wilhite is survived by his second wife, Kathaleen (née Bauer), whom he married in 2010 and with whom he enjoyed extended holidays in a well-equipped recreational vehicle, visiting almost every state in America. He is also survived by a son, David, from an earlier marriage, and four step-children, Rick Groves, Robin Landrum, Renée Bennett and Rebecca Boaz. His wife reported that when his granddaughter Kylie proudly told her computer teacher that her grandfather had invented the gif, she was distressed that she was not believed. Wilhite wrote a courteous letter to the teacher confirming the story, with the suggestion to “google it”.
Stephen Earl Wilhite was born in West Chester, Ohio, in 1948, the son of Anna Lou (née Dorsey), a nurse, and Clarence Earl Wilhite, a factory worker. In his teenage years he was shot in the face during a re-enactment of a Civil War battle as a result of a real bullet being used instead of a blank. A long spell in hospital followed but he recovered to graduate from high school as one of Ohio’s “ten top science students”.
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He studied computer science and engineering at Ohio State University and joined CompuServe shortly after the software company was founded in 1969. He wrote the code that helped the company to develop the first pioneering dial-up online information services and he was still with CompuServe 18 years later, when he was the lead engineer on the team that created the gif.
If it was teamwork, he was the visionary architect and his co-workers were merely his construction crew. “He invented gif all by himself,” his wife said. “He did that at home and brought it into work after he perfected it. He would figure out everything privately in his head and then go to town programming it on the computer.”
The invention caught on quickly with developers and was adopted by the earliest web browsers in 1991. Wilhite remained with CompuServe after its acquisition by AOL in 1997 and retired in 2001, after a stroke.
In later years he used his computing skills to run and control an elaborate model railway, which he promised his wife would be confined to the basement of the family home but which soon expanded to branch lines and model-train bridges all over the house.
After Wilhite’s death many of the tributes to him posted online were, fittingly, in the form of gifs.
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Stephen Wilhite, computer scientist, was born on March 3, 1948. He died of complications from Covid-19 on March 14, 2022, aged 74
