Wilhite, who died on March 14, developed the GIF as a way of compressing images for online use.
Internet technology pioneer Stephen Wilhite passed away on March 14 from COVID-related complications. He was 74 and he leaves behind an incredible legacy, the GIF, a game-changer for the blossoming World Wide Web in the 1990s. Wilhite, who was interested in compression technology, created the GIF at his home in 1987. “I saw the format in my head and then started programming,” he told the New York Times. He then brought the technology to his job at CompuServe, the first major Internet service provider in the US, where he made finalizing tweaks. In addition to his passion for technology, post-retirement Wilhite was an avid outdoorsman and enjoyed building model trains in his basement. The GIF or Graphics Interchange Format has been a massive component of the Internet since its inception. TechRadar’s US Editor-in-Chief, Lance Ulanoff note d in 2016 that “for webmasters in the 1990’s, GIFs were as crucial to the site-building process as HTML….
