Unfortunately, it has been announced that Stephen E. Wilhite , a computer scientist responsible for the creation of GIF, died on March 14 at 74 years of age , this after a healthcare complication caused by the Covid-19.
This information was confirmed by Kathaleen Wilhite, his wife, who shared a page for the obituary of him. Stephen is remembered to create the graphic exchange format, or GIF for its acronym in English , while working in Compuserve in 1987. Several messages from former colleagues have also indicated that Stephen also carried out other important contributions during his time in his time This company, describing a great worker who had a great influence on the success of the company.
The original idea of the GIF, was to offer a compressed image format, but of high quality. In this way, could be easily used on websites, social networks and interactive guides , which at that time used with a slow Internet that was not able to use another type of multimedia content.
In 2013, Stephen was awarded the Webby Award, one of the biggest recognitions in the Internet industry . In the acceptance discourse of him, the scientist created a great controversy, since he revealed that “GIF” is pronounced as “Jif”. Nowadays, the creation of it is used on the day to day of people, mainly as a meme.