Stephen Wilhite, father of GIFs, dies at 74 | Webby Lifetime Achievement Award winner

Last week, Stephen Wilhite, one of the inventors of the Internet's popular short video format GIF, died at the age of 74 due to the new crown.

Stephen Wilhite died of CVID-19 last week on March 14, according to Wilhite's wife, Kathaleen, in a phone interview.

His obituary page is filled with comments from former colleagues: "Stephen made other important contributions during his time at CompuServe and was a hard worker who greatly influenced the company's success", "Despite all the achievements, but he is still a very humble and kind person."

Birth of the GIF: Programming never stops

Stephen Wilhite worked on the GIF or Graphics Interchange Format while working at CompuServe in the 1980s before inventing the technology at home and perfecting it. In this regard, his wife Kathaleen said, "He will think about everything in private at home, and then go to the company to program on the computer."

Internet speeds were very slow compared to today, and GIFs made a lot of sense at the time as a technology for distributing "high-quality, high-resolution graphics" in color.

In the early 2000s, Stephen Wilhite officially retired and began to travel everywhere, for which he also built a model train in his basement.

"Even after retiring in 2001, he never stopped programming," says his wife, Kathaleen.

GIFs seem to have become synonymous with animated internet memes these days, commonly used for entertainment, messaging and parody. But it is known that this was not the original intention of Stephen Wilhite to create this graphic format.

"GIF" is pronounced "JIF"

While there has been debate over the correct pronunciation of the GIF image format, Stephen Wilhite himself knows exactly how to pronounce it.

Back in 2013, Stephen Wilhite told The New York Times: "The Oxford English Dictionary accepts two pronunciations, but they're both wrong. Its real pronunciation is a soft 'G', pronounced ' jif', that's all."

After reiterating this point, Stephen Wilhite was awarded the "Oscar of the Internet" - the Webby Life Acquisition Award - later in 2013, for his invention of GIFs, which he published with animation testimonials.

For this award, his wife Kathaleen said, "After 25 years, people finally pay tribute to what he has achieved." "Creating GIFs is the proudest thing in his life."

Stephen Wilhite said in an interview with The Times that one of his favorite GIFs is the "dancing baby" meme.

Today, let's pay tribute to Mr. Stephen Wilhite! Thanks to him for creating such an image format in the era before color images became the language of the Internet, contributing to the development of the Internet, and bringing wonderfulness to Internet users.