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Stephen Wilhite, Creator of the GIF, Has Died (theverge.com) 128

Posted by BeauHD from the rest-in-peace dept.
Stephen Wilhite, one of the lead inventors of the GIF, died last week from COVID at the age of 74, according to his wife, Kathaleen, who spoke to The Verge. From the report: Stephen Wilhite worked on GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for reactions, messages, and jokes, while employed at CompuServe in the 1980s. He retired around the early 2000s and spent his time traveling, camping, and building model trains in his basement.

Although GIFs are synonymous with animated internet memes these days, that wasn't the reason Wilhite created the format. CompuServe introduced them in the late 1980s as a way to distribute "high-quality, high-resolution graphics" in color at a time when internet speeds were glacial compared to what they are today. "He invented GIF all by himself -- he actually did that at home and brought it into work after he perfected it," Kathaleen said. "He would figure out everything privately in his head and then go to town programming it on the computer."

If you want to go more in-depth into the history of the GIF, the Daily Dot has a good explainer of how the format became an internet phenomenon. In 2013, Wilhite weighed in on the long-standing debate about the correct pronunciation of the image format. He told The New York Times, "The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft 'G,' pronounced 'jif.' End of story."
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Stephen Wilhite, Creator of the GIF, Has Died More

Stephen Wilhite, Creator of the GIF, Has Died

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  • That settles it. (Score:3, Funny)

    by NFN_NLN ( 633283 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @05:44PM (#62384295)

    > It is a soft 'G,' pronounced 'jif.' End of story."

    Slashdot is always wrong, therefore confirming the correct hard 'G' pronunciation.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Only a fool would think otherwise:
      1. Graphic Interchange Format - the fucking acronym starts with a hard G.
      2. Jiff already exists as a competing image format and a fucking peanut butter.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Xenx ( 2211586 )

        2. Jiff already exists as a competing image format

        GIF predates JIF, so at least that part of your argument is invalidated.

        • your assertion is wholly wrong, JIF peanut butter (nee 1958) had been around decades prior to Stephen Wilhite inventing GIFs and told us all to say it like the peanut butter. "Choosy programmers, Choose GIF" RIP to a great software programmer - Stephen Wilhite

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Xenx ( 2211586 )
            Did I quote anything about the peanut butter? I quoted about the image format.
            • I choose to believe JIF is also pronounced "GIF".

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Xenx ( 2211586 )
                GIF is one of those instances where there is a difference between correct/incorrect and right/wrong. Given the source, soft G is correct. However, it's still clearly wrong. /s
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Definitely a hard 'G'. Mr. Wilhite's gift was GIF. Pronouncing it jif is still a bug.

    • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 )

      Slashdot is always wrong, therefore confirming the correct hard 'G' pronunciation.

      Given GIF is short for "Graphics Interchange Format", not "Giraffic Interchange Format" - the hard "G" makes more sense.

      • Given GIF is short for "Graphics Interchange Format", not "Giraffic Interchange Format" - the hard "G" makes more sense.

        Do you also pronounce JPEG "Jay-Feg"?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dfghjk ( 711126 )

        It's always nice when someone self-identifies as ignorant. Saves a lot of time.

      • Wait you mean it's not pronounced jraphics?

      • If that rule always applied we'd all be walking around saying SC-UH-BA instead of SC-OO-BA. Self-contained UH-nderwater Breathing Apparatus. We pronounce the A in RAM like the word ram instead of the a in access. If you prefer it that way, fine, you can go around saying SCUHBA too, but don't pretend there's an actual rule. That's FUBAR (not FUHBAR). Quite the snafu (not sn-AW-F-UH).

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Chaset ( 552418 )

          Exactly. It'd be interesting to hear the parent poster speak.
          He'd go "scuh-bha diving", put money in his "Roth ee-rha", play "lacer tag" with his friends, ponder "Nah-to" response to Russia,
          Microcontrollers use "SPee" interface and "yu-ay-art".
          Did you know "Syun Microsystems" got its start as Stanford University Networks?
          Did he catch "Co-vie-d-19"?

          I'm sure there's thousands of others if I bothered to go searching for it.
          I would expect any acronym ending in "CE" is pronounced with a soft C regardless of the

      • There's no rule anywhere that says the letters in the acronym has to be pronounced the same as the original word.
        Do you pronounce "laser" as "lacer"? (it's "stimulation", not "ztimulation")
        Do yo pronounce "SCUBA" as "Scuh-bha" (U is short in "underwater")
        When "IRA" is pronounced as a word, everyone says "Ah-i-rha", not "ee-ra". (I've never heard anyone say "Roth ee-rha account")

        So why do people insist on "Ghiff"? Or rather, the hard G in "graphic" is definitely not a reason to prefer "Ghiff". Obviously,

    • I can now say it like G as in Graphics without offending the creator.

      That's my take away.

      • I can now say it like G as in Graphics without offending the creator.

        Considering that the creator is dead, you can say it anyway you want without offending him.

        When I first encountered it in the 1980's, I instinctively pronounced it with the soft g. Then I ran into a series of articles and rants on BBS's (and later, the Internet) insisting that it was properly pronounced with a hard g, so I started pronouncing it with the hard g.

        Fast forward to today, and everyone I know pronounces it with a hard g. I think the hard-g crowd has won the battle, and the creator's wishes have b

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by edwdig ( 47888 )

          Considering that the creator is dead, you can say it anyway you want without offending him.

          When I first encountered it in the 1980's, I instinctively pronounced it with the soft g. Then I ran into a series of articles and rants on BBS's (and later, the Internet) insisting that it was properly pronounced with a hard g, so I started pronouncing it with the hard g.

          Fast forward to today, and everyone I know pronounces it with a hard g. I think the hard-g crowd has won the battle, and the creator's wishes have been overrun by common usage, so I'm going to start pronouncing it with a soft g. Not because I want to honor the creator, but because I've found myself residing on the side of the majority. When that happens, I always stop and reflect on how frightening the majority usually is.

          I've never heard anyone use a hard-G in person. It blew my mind when I learned there was even a debate. I'm still not convinced that the hard-G pronunciation is anything other than people making up something stupid to fight about online.

          • Same here, since the very beginning of the GIF era I have personally never ever heard anyone say it with the hard G. I remember Stephen Wilhite telling us folks back on CompuServe boards how he based it on a rephrasing of the popular peanut butter ad campaign of the day :
            Choosie Programmers Choose GIF

            So I have always pronounced it like JIF, in fact it's my favorite peanut butter brand too. The johnnie come latelys that claim to have won the battle actually lost in the end when he made the final pronou

          • Trust me. There are some individuals that pronounce it with a hard-G when speaking. It still sets my teeth on edge.

            When I saw my first .gif file on CompuServe it was revolutionary. GIF files looked so much better than BMP and RLE files. The ability to add text comments, transparent overlays, etc was a huge improvement and quickly became the standard despite the patent trolls that appeared later.

            You can still see the introductory .gif file here. http://i.imgur.com/zEAGXhB.gif [imgur.com]

            Steven will be missed and re

          • I've never heard anyone use a hard-G in person.

            I come from an old school geek community, specifically in Santa Cruz, and I literally never ever heard anyone in the BBS community OR the UCSC geek community pronounce GIF with a soft G. And I'm talking about well over a hundred hardcore users here. This may just come down to regional differences. However, it flatly does not make sense to pronounce it with a soft G, especially in the USA where Jif peanut butter is a cultural icon. Since that's already pronounced with a soft sound, it only makes sense to pro

            • I have surprisingly never once experienced confusion between Jif peanut butter and a digital graphics file format. I don't even know how I'd make that into a sandwich.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by ksheff ( 2406 )
              I never used CompuServe, but did use several different dial up and internet based BBS services starting in the late 80s. I never heard about the soft G pronunciation until the last 10-15 years. Prior to that, everyone I ever ran into pronounced it with the hard G like the words graphics and gift.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by edwdig ( 47888 )

              I'm from the NYC area. If anything, the Jif Peanut Butter makes it easier to use the soft G, as it's a familiar pronunciation.

              I wouldn't be surprised if it's a regional thing, but I've never heard it discussed.

              • I'm from the NYC area. If anything, the Jif Peanut Butter makes it easier to use the soft G, as it's a familiar pronunciation.

                No, your mouth makes it easier to use the soft G, maybe that's why people do it, laziness. The fact that the two are spelled differently normally makes people think that GIF should be pronounced differently from JIF. This is borne out by polling [wikipedia.org], although the margin is not large.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      > It is a soft 'G,' pronounced 'jif.' End of story."

      Slashdot is always wrong, therefore confirming the correct hard 'G' pronunciation.

      I use the Spanish pronunciation for the G and I with an unusual elongated F at the end just to make sure "heefff" pisses everyone off.

  • You will be missed!

  • The model trains, I can understand... but how does one travel or camp in one's basement? That must've been quite a big basement!

  • Is "RIP" pronounced with a soft or hard P?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      Dunno, SuperKendall, what would Apple say?

      Perhaps it's pronounced with a "zzz" like Elon Musk would do. I think you should let your team decide, then you should preach it like a universal truth.

  • The animated gif is a testament to the importance of compatibility and adoption for a file format. It sucks at compression and quality, and doesn’t support any sound whatsoever.

    How many expert committees and standards organizations and patent wars revolved around implementing and promoting dozens of “superior” internet video formats (including codecs and containers and server/client software)? Despite all that effort and conflict, the animated gif reigned supreme as THE most widely us

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dfghjk ( 711126 )

      "Because it works absolutely everywhere, since the 90s."

      Because it works everywhere, but for more reasons that that. JPEG also works everywhere and is superior in many ways, but GIF offered features not found in JPEG or elsewhere. GIF's success is a combination of great timing and unique features. It was supported everywhere BECAUSE if this and it's longevity is a testament to those features, not its universal support.

    • Because it works absolutely everywhere, since the 90s.

      Yeah, and it works everywhere specifically because it's so limited. GIF was created to make compressed images feasible on limited hardware. Back in the day, when such things were new to desktop users, it took a perceptible amount of time to decode a JPEG (with speeds measured MHz, and limited to low tens of them) but a GIF was easy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rbrander ( 73222 )

      I was asked to create an animation anybody could use, showed a map changing over time, so I set up the GIS map client to loop; save a PNG with every refresh, advancing the year by one - giving me 80 PNG files. I assumed that the moving version of PNG, which is "MNG", would be the recent, superior format, that GIF was for people not up on the latest.

      I found it barely supported at all, and when I got the special program to make an MNG out of the PNGs, it was a larger file than the GIF version. Much. Thr

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bh_doc ( 930270 )

      As if GIF was immune to patent troubles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      Arguably if it weren't for that, we wouldn't have PNG now.

  • Hard G, Soft G (Score:3)

    by nuckfuts ( 690967 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @06:06PM (#62384393)

    It's odd that the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format insists that GIF is pronounced with a soft G, when the word "graphics" is pronounced with a hard G.

    It's similar to how most people pronounce Gigabyte with a hard G, even though the prefix giga comes from the Greek word for "giant", which we pronounce with a soft G.

    • Woah. Jiggabyte. I like that.

    • Re:Hard G, Soft G (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GrumpySteen ( 1250194 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @06:28PM (#62384487)

      Do you say jay-feg for jpeg? Photographic isn't pronounced with a hard P, after all.

      Welcome to human language, where some things aren't consistent and don't always make logical sense.

    • Re:Hard G, Soft G (Score:4, Informative)

      by black3d ( 1648913 ) on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @07:34PM (#62384631)
      It's not really weird. We don't, as a rule, pronounce acronyms based on the pronunciation of their component words. Otherwords, we'd pronounce scuba as "scubber" with a hard U for Underwater, rather than as "scooba". And don't even get me started on how we'd pronounce the E in laser. We simply pronounce acronyms whichever way "feels" right - as a collective descriptivist movement.

      The decision to pronounce GIF with a hard G is largely preferentially descriptivist - adapted as a hard G by oodles of people who first encountered the word, had never heard it pronounced with a soft G, and went with what sounds right to them. Equally, many of us who were around with GIF was invented often tend to use a soft-G, because that's the way it was described.

      Neither is "more correct" from an English standpoint. Language adapts to how people speak, not the other way around. Some misguided folks will try to say it's "settled" that the hard-G is correct because descriptivism determines that the majority rules, which is exactly the opposite to how it works. Telling people it's "settled" and there's only one right way to speak is actually prescriptivism - the opposite of the position they're trying to extol. If both forms are in use, descriptivism happily encompasses that. A soft G like "gym" is fine. A hard G like "git" is fine. Both will continue being fine as long as the person you're speaking to understands you in context. It only becomes an issue in communication when that's no longer the case.
      • mod +1000

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nazrhyn ( 906126 )
        You definitely get an honorary +1 from me for bringing linguistic descriptivism and prescriptivism into this discussion.

      • The decision to pronounce GIF with a hard G is largely preferentially descriptivist - adapted as a hard G by oodles of people who first encountered the word, had never heard it pronounced with a soft G, and went with what sounds right to them. Equally, many of us who were around with GIF was invented often tend to use a soft-G, because that's the way it was described.

        Please show me where in the GIF87a specification the pronounciation is described.

        I was around then, downloaded the specification and both implemented my own decoder as well as hand coded gifs in hex editors to get as small images as possible, and in neither in the GIF87a (or later GIF89a) specification nor any other documentation I read at the time was pronounciation ever mentioned. So this was not common knowledge in the late 80's. Only much later was this ever brought up as a topic that needed clarificati

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by thule ( 9041 )
          I suppose you never downloaded BOB_89A.GIF. Seems odd that you would have missed that file since it was a demonstration of the features in the GIF specification. Load that file with CSHOW.EXE (CompuShow) and it would display text over the picture that said: Oh, incidentally, it's pronounced "JIF"

          It was definitely out there, and I knew plenty of people that pronounced it that way.

          • I suppose you never downloaded BOB_89A.GIF. Seems odd that you would have missed that file since it was a demonstration of the features in the GIF specification.

            No, I never did. If it was something floating around on Compuserve, mind you that for someone not living in the US, Compuserve was out of reach.

            Still there is no mention of the pronounciation in either specification document, neither GIF87a (https://www.w3.org/Graphics/GIF/spec-gif87.txt) nor GIF89a (https://web.archive.org/web/20021023134809/http://www.nikis.de/181/gif89a.htm, sorry for the link but this one seems to have link-rotted in all the regular places).

            From what I can find, the image you talk about

      • A hard G like "git" is fine.

        It's pronounced "jit".

        j/k

        or g/k, not sure any more

    • Are you saying that the pronunciation of GigaWatt in "Back to the Future" was actually correct?

    • The English language is defined by usage, Almost everyone uses the hard "G", so that's the (or at least a) correct pronunciation.

    • It's similar to how most people pronounce Gigabyte with a hard G, even though the prefix giga comes from the Greek word for "giant", which we pronounce with a soft G.

      It's remarkable how many people idiotically parrot this repeatedly yet cannot be bothered to actually look up the spelling or hear the pronunciation of the Greek word for "giant".

      In Modern Greek, a gamma at the beginning of a word is pronounced like a "y" in "yet".

      In Ancient Greek, a gamma at the beginning of a word is pronounced like a "

  • The "jif" annunciation gave rise to an amusing humourous expression from the peanut butter...

    "Choosy perverts choose GIF."

    I remember much of the "scandals" in the computer labs in the 1990's...especially with animated GIF's...but people are people...

    I once sat down at a workstation, and someone had forgotten to log out, and in X-Windows there was a gif...I simply logged the person out, after send an e-mail to themselves, with the quote. :)

    JoshK.

    • Beware of geeks bearing GIFs :-)

      • :-) Indeed. I thought of, recalled another...

        "Get to the GIF of it..." for a long-winded, verbose answer, conversational point.

        I read (mostly, Hitler was a babbling, bore) that statement in "Mein Kampf" which I read (sort of) in college.

        JoshK.

  • Having been around for several decades I have yet to meet anybody who does.

    • I've been around...building websites for a living since the '90s. Some with animated gif backgrounds. (Hell yes!)

      I've always been on the jif train. 'Animated jif' is way easier to say than 'animated gif'. At least I need to stall a little bit before the hard g.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thule ( 9041 )
      I do! I learned it that way when GIF was new. There was a .gif from CompuServe that stated that it should be pronounced "jif". Back in those days, everyone I knew pronounced it "jif"... probably because they saw the same file.

    • I pronounce it both ways. That way it pisses off both groups! /s

  • He loved giraffes so much that he named a graphics format after them.

    (Otherwise, it would have been pronounced with a hard G)

  • For anyone arguing to the contrary I would find a bullying gif.

  • It is pronounced "gif" though. It is not the first time a creation gets away from its creator.
    • Since both pronunciations are in common use, both are fine. Determining there's only one way to speak is very prescriptivist, and not really how language works. I'd certainly concur that hard-G pronunciation is much more common thesedays, although in part because people are incorrectly told that any other pronunciation is "wrong". As long as the person you're speaking to understands what you're saying, the burden of communication has been met. Insisting it be pronounced one way or the other is trying to inh

      • I'd certainly concur that hard-G pronunciation is much more common thesedays, although in part because people are incorrectly told that any other pronunciation is "wrong".

        Wrong schmong, but we should attempt to normalize sensible pronunciations, because it only makes sense. There's no rule that says an acronym has to be pronounced like the word[s] that lend[s] it its letters, but there should be, simply because it would be less confusing.

  • It's spelled Stephen, but pronounced Steven

  • There were others but that's the one I remember. Used to animate company logos with it back in the day. Unfortunately, at over a whopping 100Kb, the files were way usually way too large to serve up one the website unless you had a logo with only a few colours and limited number of frames in the GIF.

  • I'll start using the 'j' sound as soon as I can download a giraffe over the Internet. It's Graphics Interchange Format (hard G). The acronym should use the same sound as the words it comes from when practical. If it were a soft 'g' in the acronym, that would imply that "graphics" starts with a soft 'g', and it doesn't. If it did, it would sound like "giraffe".

    Somebody can be perfectly brilliant in a lot of ways, and yet still be wrong. IMHO this is one of those times but that's beside the point.

    RIP and

  • Rest In Peace Mr. Wilhite. I will never pronounce it JIF.

  • From TFA:

    The company was later bought by AOL in 1998 and allowed the GIF patents to expire

    No, they didn't "allow" the GIF patents to expire, they expired as the law intended. Unlike a copyright, it is impossible to renew a patent.

  • ...people can stop saying 'jif'. That's dumb.

    Never understood how you'd go from the hard-G of "Graphics Information Format" to j-sound.

  • APNG and MNG were supposed to be viable alternatives. Not so much anymore. GIF lives on, RIP its creator. And other TLA's.

    • PNG (Score:2)

      by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      I think PNG is used more than GIF now for lossless compression. Though, really, dithering images down to 8-bit color isn't exactly "lossless" unless it's line art.

      APNG/MNG were supposed to replace animated GIFS which, I think, webm is currently in the process of doing.

      • MNG was really a failure, because APNG got there first.

        Google is pushing WebP as the PNG replacement. And it's a good format: The lossless compression is far superior to PNG, the lossy compression is better than JPEG, and you can even combine lossy image with lossless alpha mask. And it does animation.

        WebM is intended to serve a slightly different role. It's a video-first format, rather than an image format with video capabilities. It's got the option to us much more sophisticated lossy compression, and sou

  • Died of Covid, therefore unvaccinated?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      Could have been vaccinated. Vaccines reduce the risk of severe covid by 90%, which means there's still a 10% chance of being vaccinated and having severe covid anyway.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tchdab1 ( 164848 )

        I've casual-searched several reports of his death, and am surprised I could find no comments on vaxed-or-not, and no one seems to care if so. I care!

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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