As Eric Limer explains in Popular Mechanics: The way it worked was to identify repeating patterns, then simplify them, allowing for lossless compression of files-meaning none of the data is trimmed in the shortening process. What made the format revolutionary was a specific compression algorithm, named Lempel-Ziv-Welch for its three creators (Abraham Lemepl, Jacob Ziv and Terry Welch). Initially, GIFs were used almost exclusively for still images. Even dictionaries like Oxford English have unhelpfully declared both pronunciations valid.) But that has hardly settled the debate, as many others insist on the hard “g” as in the word “gift” but without the “t”. (For the record, Wilhite pronounces his creation with a soft G, using a play on the peanut butter ad as a demonstration: “Choosy developers choose GIF.” He reiterated the point when he was given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013 Webby Awards. His new creation could be used for exchange images between computers, and he called it Graphics Interchange Format. How could a color image file be shared without taking up too much of the computer’s memory? Wilhite found a way to do so using a compression algorithm (more on this soon) combined with image parameters like the number of available colors (256).
It was 1987, four years before the advent of the World Wide Web, when users who wanted to access email or transfer files did so with hourly subscriptions from companies like CompuServe. Thanks to the humble GIF, no emotions are too big or small to capture in animated image form.ĭeveloper Steve Wilhite and his team at tech giant CompuServe had a problem to solve: how to make a computer display an image while also saving memory. Whether you love them or decry their infantilizing impact on language, it’s impossible to go long without seeing them on the news, social media, or even in office Slack rooms. Since their creation 30 years ago, the looping clips have followed a rocky path to stardom, going from ubiquitous to repudiated and back again. What do Barack Obama, the sloth from Zootopia, and a bear waving its paw have in common? All were named “ most popular in 2016” for that most zeitgeist-y of Internet memes: animated GIFs. GIFs have gone from still images to ubiquitous forms of communication across the Internet and social media.
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