Remembering the late Stephen Wilhite, lead inventor of the GIF

In 2013, Wilhite received the Webby Lifetime Achievement Award where he was also honoured with a montage of iconic GIFs made by Internet users over the years. — Screenshot from The Webby Awards/YouTube

Computer scientist Stephen Wilhite, who is known for inventing the Graphics Interchange Format or GIF, has died of Covid-19 on March 14. He was 74 years old.

According to a report by The Verge, Wilhite – while working for CompuServe in the late 1980s – invented GIFs as a way to distribute high quality images with high resolution during a time when Internet speeds were considered sluggish compared to today’s standards.