San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Programmer invented looping GIF animations
Stephen Wilhite, a computer programmer who was best known for inventing the GIF, the looping animations that became a universal language for conveying humor, sarcasm and angst on social media and in instant messages, died March 14 in Cincinnati. He was 74.
His death, at a hospital, was confirmed Thursday by his wife, Kathaleen Wilhite, who said that the cause was complications of COVID-19.
In 1987, while Stephen Wilhite was working for CompuServe, the nation’s first online service, he led a team of engineers who revolutionized how people could share video clips on the internet. They called the format they created a GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format, a type of compressed image file with an ease of use that made it enduring.
The technology’s appeal expanded from computers to smartphones, giving the famous and the not-so-famous the ability to share GIFs on services like Twitter and Facebook and eventually to create their own loops. It inspired the famous “dancing baby” GIF in 1996, which Wilhite cited as one of his favorites, and popular apps like Giphy.
“I saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming,” Wilhite told the New York Times in 2013.
That year, Wilhite, who was also a former chief architect for America Online, received a lifetime achievement honor at the Webby Awards.
Tributes to Wilhite spread online after his death was reported, many of them, fittingly, in the form of GIFs.
The Police Department in Eau Claire, Wis., honored Wilhite on its official Twitter account Thursday, sharing a GIF of Captain America saluting. The Bengaluru Football Club in India encouraged its followers on Twitter to share GIFs in tribute and offered one of its own: an animated portrait of Wilhite.
Stephen Wilhite was born in West Chester, Ohio, on March 3, 1948. His father, Clarence Earl Wilhite, was a factory worker and his mother, Anna Lou Dorsey, was a nurse.
Later in life, Wilhite captured the history of his invention in a
Steve Wilhite was honored at the Webby Awards in 2013.
three-page document that he shared with his children and grandchildren, his wife said.
When one of his granddaughters, Kylie, told her computer teacher that her grandfather had invented the GIF, the teacher did not believe her, Kathaleen Wilhite said. This prompted Stephen Wilhite to write a letter to the teacher to confirm the story. “Then he signed it Steve Wilhite and he said, ‘Google it,’ ” Kathaleen Wilhite said.
Stephen Wilhite retired at 51 after a stroke, but he kept busy using his computer programming skills to augment his model railroad, a hobby that his wife said was supposed to be confined to the basement of his home but spilled into other rooms, with Wilhite building model-train bridges in his upstairs office.
Kathaleen Wilhite said that her husband also loved to spend time outdoors and that they went on many camping trips with her son Rick, who she said was one of Stephen Wilhite’s “best buddies.”
They traveled from their home in Milford, Ohio, to the tip of Florida and to the Grand Canyon, she said. “Steve loved the pine trees in the north, and I love the ocean, so that gave us a big span,” Kathaleen Wilhite said.
The couple married in 2010, when they were both in their 60s. Kathaleen Wilhite said that their first date was at a Cracker Barrel the year before they married.
“We were together every day from that day,” she said. “We might have met later in life, but we sure made up for it.”
In addition to his wife, Stephen Wilhite’s survivors include a son, David Wilhite; his stepchildren Rick Groves, Robin Landrum, Renee Bennett and Rebecca Boaz; 11 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. A previous marriage ended in divorce.
Wilhite tested positive for COVID-19 on March 1 and was hospitalized a few days later, according to Kathaleen Wilhite, who also contracted COVID-19 but had less severe symptoms. She said that the doctor told her that the virus attacked Stephen Wilhite’s right lung, which had been damaged from the stroke.
In 2012, Oxford American Dictionaries recognized GIF as its “word of the year.”
While the usefulness of Wilhite’s innovation was undisputed, the pronunciation of “GIF” was a frequent subject of debate — and even the subject of a “Final Jeopardy!” answer. Was it pronounced with a hard G sound or a soft one?
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Wilhite told the Times in 2013. “They are wrong. It is a soft G, pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”