Chances are, you shared or received a GIF today, whether on social media or a messaging application. In 1987, developer Steve Wilhite and his team at CompuServe had no idea the impact they would have on modern communication when they invented the GIF, a new file type that allowed users to share color image files without hogging precious computer memory. Learn more about its history in this edition of Tech Time Warp.
GIF was short for “Graphics Interchange Format,” and the file type was initially designed for still images. Using the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression algorithm, Wilhite was able to make complicated images much smaller in size. In simple terms, the LZW algorithm identifies and then compresses repeating patterns within data, thereby decreasing file size without compromising data integrity. (LZW is a “lossless” form of compression named for its inventors, Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch.)
The GIF’s rocky road to internet fame
The LZW algorithm had a catch, however. The algorithm was under a patent owned by Unisys Corp. Eight years after Wilhite’s innovation, Unisys decided the GIF was too popular not to take advantage of that patent. They began charging a small royalty on any software relying on the algorithm. The Unisys patent didn’t run out until 2003 in the U.S. and 2004 elsewhere. Although only corporate users were asked to pay the royalty, the move by Unisys didn’t sit well with the free-spirited developers of the era, who responded by not only creating the PNG (Portable Network Graphics or, if you’re feeling sassy, PING—“Ping Is Not GIF”) file format but also holding “Burn All GIFs” day on Nov. 5, 1999.
Woe to the users who deleted all their GIFs in 1999. These days, GIFs are a bona fide component of modern communication. Researchers at Brigham Young University have identified three types of GIF users: enthusiasts, who are well-versed in internet culture and use GIFs most frequently; searchers, who tend to confine their use to humorous situations; and referentialists, who focus on GIFs due to their pop culture references. In case you’re wondering, Wilhite, who passed away in 2022, pronounced GIF with a soft G, like the peanut butter brand. His favorite GIF was the dancing baby—the meme that tormented TV character Ally McBeal.
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This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.