• 1994 Events: Compuserve and Unisys announced plans to charge royalties on the GIF file format on December 24. GIF was developed by CompuServe for cross-platform graphics sharing. It became popular on early web and bulletin boards. When the World Wide Web came along, GIF was widely used. The problem with GIF being truly free was the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression algorithm protected by a patent held by Unisys.
• Why Unisys could charge royalties: Commercial graphics software was already paying a royalty. But software that was free didn't have to pay. Unisys' announcement of licensing fees for non-commercial and private websites led to backlash. The compression tool Gzip was an alternative.
• Invisible GIF hack: Early HTML lacked text control. The trick was to use a single pixel transparent GIF as a spacer to adjust line spacing and position elements. It was a popular technique but not worth the licensing fee. HTML later matured, and the need for such hacks decreased.
• GIF's comeback in the 21st century: Unisys' patents expired worldwide in 2003-2004, and IBM's relevant patent expired in 2006. Animated GIFs came back as a convenient format for sharing short videos on social media. Internet Explorer supported GIF, making it the cross-browser animated file format standard. Today, it's hard to believe GIF almost vanished for about 10 years, and there's still a debate on how to pronounce it.
• Author's background: David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written about computers since 1991 and has worked in IT since 1994, specializing in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications and blogs about retro computers and gaming.