Creator Of Animated GIF Image Format, Stephen Wilhite Dies Following Complications From COVID-19
Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the looping animated GIF image format, died last week from COVID-19 at 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen.
He and his wife, Kathaleen Wilhite, had just purchased a new truck and camper in hopes of camping at some of their favorite spots in Tennessee, Kentucky and Michigan when everything suddenly changed.
On March 1, Steve Wilhite, the beloved creator of the GIF file format, contracted COVID-19.
The death was confirmed in an obituary, which said Wilhite, one the chief architect of America Online, died March 14 — just days after his 74th birthday on March 3. He died of COVID-19, his wife, Kathaleen, confirmed.
Kathaleen, who had also contracted COVID-19, had Steve taken to a hospital near their home in Milford, Ohio, where he was treated with antibiotics before being placed in intensive care.
The pair couldn’t see each other because of her diagnosis, she said. Steve was ultimately placed in a coma. Kathaleen tested negative on or about March 10 and was able to be by his bedside, she said. Then she received a call on March 14 from the hospital.
“They said, ‘Mrs. Wilhite, you need to get here right away,’ that ‘he has turned to the worse, and you need to come,’ ” Kathaleen said, recalling the conversation.
Shortly after her arrival, Steve passed away due to complications from COVID-19, Kathaleen revealed. He was 74.
“It’s just so bad. It’s just so tragic,” Kathaleen said.
In the weeks leading up to March 1, Kathaleen said, Steve could be found in his model-train room tinkering with his creations and computer programming, one of his constants in life, which led to the creation of the GIF file format in 1987 while he was at CompuServe.
Wilhite began his career at Compuserve, the first major commercial online service provider. In 1987, he created the Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, to compress images to make them accessible for early modem speeds.
Years later, it became social media’s primary method of conveying emotion and memetic communication. The GIF format has been used as a convenient way to show graphs, drawings and simple animations.
Steve stayed at CompuServe working on various systems until 2001, experiencing a stroke before he retired.
In the 2000s, Myspace accounts were littered with buttons that glittered or scrolled by on a loop. In 2012, GIF was pronounced word of the year by Oxford American Dictionary, thanks to its resurgence in popularity among bloggers, especially on Tumblr and other sites.
Many over the years debated how GIF is supposed to be pronounced. In 2013, Wilhite settled the debate, declaring that it is pronounced with a soft “g,” like the peanut butter brand Jif. Some still use a hard “g” when they use the word.
Today, GIFs are a mainstay of communication on the internet.
