After corona infection: GIF inventor dead – “We owe a lot to his foresight”
Created: 03/24/2022, 13:59
Anyone who uses a smartphone has probably sent a GIF at least once.
© Xavier Lorenzo/Imago
The short animations are the basis of many memes.
The idea for them dates back to the 1980s.
Stephen Wilhite was a major driving force behind it.
Columbus - Who can do without GIFs these days?
Few.
One of their inventors has now died.
According to US media reports, the US computer scientist Stephen Wilhite was 74 years old.
He was ill with Covid-19.
There were numerous expressions of condolence on Twitter, for example from the GIF search engine Giphy.
"We owe a lot to his creativity and vision," the tweet reads.
Like a short video, a GIF plays a series of frames.
The short clips, which have been shared millions of times, are often used on social media to share statements about feelings with a picture.
The abbreviation GIF stands for
Graphics Interchange Format
.
GIF inventor Wilhite died: He sold the idea to Compuserve
Wilhite fell asleep last week with the family, his wife Kathaleen told the technology portal
The Verge
on Wednesday (local time) .
Wilhite developed the GIF format alone at home in the 1980s and then introduced it to his employer at the time, the Internet provider Compuserve, his wife said.
The technology was used to send high-resolution color graphics despite the very slow internet at the time.
Wilhite attached importance to the correct English pronunciation of the invention.
He once told
the
New York Times that a soft "G" was correct, i.e. "Jif" (in German: "Dschif").
After retiring, the scientist dabbled in travel, camping and building model trains in his basement, his widow said.
(dpa/frs)
