Stephen Wilhite, creator of animated GIF, dies at 74

Stephen E. Wilhite, the programmer best known for inventing the GIF, the loop animations that have become a universal language for conveying humor, sarcasm and anguish on social media and instant messaging, died in Cincinnati (Ohio, Central eastern US) on March 14. He was 74 years old.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed on Thursday (24) by his wife, Kathaleen Wilhite, who said the cause was complications from Covid-19.

In 1987, while Stephen Wilhite worked for CompuServe, America’s first online service, he led a team of engineers that revolutionized the way people could share video clips on the Internet. They called the format they created GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format, a compressed image file type with an ease of use that made it enduring.

The appeal of this technology has expanded from computers to smartphones, giving the famous and not so famous the ability to share GIFs on platforms like Twitter and Facebook and eventually create their own loops. It inspired the famous “dancing baby” GIF in 1996 and popular apps like Giphy.

“I saw the format I wanted in my head and started coding,” Wilhite told The New York Times in 2013.

That year, Wilhite, who had also been chief architect of America Online, received a lifetime achievement award at the Webby Awards.

In addition to his wife, Wilhite is survived by a son, David, his stepchildren (Rick Groves, Robin Landrum, Renee Bennett and Rebecca Boaz), 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

In 2012, the Oxford American Dictionaries recognized GIF as their “Word of the Year”.

While the utility of Wilhite’s innovation was indisputable, the pronunciation of “GIF” was a frequent subject of discussion. Was it pronounced with a strong or soft G?

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Wilhite said. “They’re wrong. It’s a soft G, pronounced ‘jif’. End of story.”