Stephen Wilhite, the brains behind the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), passed away on March 14th, days after his 74th birthday. Stephen, one of AOL’s primary architects, died due to COVID-19 related issues.

Stephen came up with GIFs in 1987 while working at Compuserve. GIFs rose to popularity and became the prominent mode of ??expression and memetic communication on a bunch of social media platforms. GIF maintained its de facto standard status for 8-bit colour images on the Internet until PNG became a viable alternative.

CompuServe initially introduced GIFs in the late 1980s as a way to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in colour at a time when internet speeds were painstakingly low.

Before working with CompuServe Information Manager, he ran a team that created compilers and run-time systems for use on the DECsystem-10 computers. Most notable were the FORTRAN and BASIC compilers and run-time systems, and a substantial library called “BTOOLS” to support BLISS programming.

After a successful career, Stephen retired around the early 2000s and spent his time travelling, camping, and building model trains in his basement. Wilhite won a lifetime achievement award at The Webby Awards in 2013.