In recent years, since his retirement, he has been building toy trains in the basement and traveling, mostly camping, with his wife Kathaleen: Stephen Wilhite, the dad of the gifs, died at 74 from the coronavirus at Milford Hospital, Ohio.
It has given the world a formidable graphic format (whose name pronounced “jif” and not “ghif”), the Graphic Interchange Format, created to convey better quality images at the dawn of the Internet and then became, in an incredible ride lasted thirty years and told by Daily Dotthe ideal container for memes and digital colds, integrated into all social platforms.
Wilhite worked on Gif when was an employee of CompuServe (a company now controlled by America On Line and therefore by Verizon), one of the first commercial operators on the Internet, in the Eighties: “He did everything himself – explained his wife to The Verge – he worked on it at home and after having perfected it he brought the project to the office “. The release of this bitmap image format took place exactly in June 1987. It revealed itself over time, thanks to the portability and low weight of files compressed with the LZW technique, also patented in the mid-1980s and of which it was in fact a development, a master key of the Web from the nineties onwards. But above all the subject of an almost surreal rediscovery starting from the 2000s, in parallel with the spread of social media and the so-called viralization of the contents produced by users. So much so that some specialized platforms and apps, such as Giphy, were successful, then purchased as (in this case) from Facebook or included in the most important social networks and chats, from WhatsApp to Twitter, up to Slack.
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Why do you say “jif” and not “ghif”
As for the long and amusing debate on the correct pronunciation of the acronym, a lot has been said: the question was resolved by Wilhite himself, who in 2013 explained to the New York Times how the only possible pronunciation for the graphic interchange format was “jif”, with a gentle and not too strong “g”, and certainly not the horrible “ghif”. With all due respect to the many Italians who use it believing they are doing well and giving themselves a tone and above all the Oxford English Dictionary, which at the time approved both pronunciations but has for some time only reported the one favored by its brilliant inventor.
“I imagined the format in my head and started programming it,” he explained at the time. AND the first image was that of an airplane.
The success and diffusion of that format, and of the animated images used to react or respond in an immediate and sometimes hilarious way to different situations (often even self-produced from their own photos or videos, since there are hundreds of apps to do it in a few steps) was certified 10 years ago by the Oxford American Dictionary which in 2012 named “gif” word of the year. Although the standard for 8-bit images had long been the png format, gifs had already become something very different. The next year Wilhite received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Webby Awardsa kind of Internet Oscar for the contribution to the technologies and formats that have given life to the Internet over the years.