Coronavirus: Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, dead at 74 from COVID-19

Stephen Wilhite, who created the animated GIF image format, died earlier this month from complications after contracting COVID-19, his wife said. He was 74.

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According to an obituary, Wilhite died March 14, in Milford, Ohio, according to NPR. His wife, Kathaleen Wilhite, confirmed that COVID-19 was the cause of death, the website reported.

“It came on suddenly. He woke up one morning and he said, ‘Honey, I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good at all.’ And he was running a fever, throwing up so badly,” Kathaleen Wilhite told NPR on Wednesday night. “And then the next day he started coughing badly.”

Stephen Wilhite invented the Graphics Interchange Format, which is now used for animated internet memes and jokes, when he worked for CompuServe in the 1980s, Yahoo News reported. In 1987, Wilhite perfected the GIF to compress images to make them accessible for early modem speeds, according to NBC News.

GIF was named the word of the year in 2012 by the Oxford American Dictionary, the network reported.

“I think the first GIF was a picture of a plane. It was a long time ago,” Stephen Wilhite told the Daily Dot in an interview via Facebook in May 2012.

He was honored with a lifetime achievement award by the Webby Awards in 2013, NPR reported. Stephen Wilhite played a GIF as his acceptance speech, which emphasized the format’s pronunciation as “jif,” and not “gif.”

“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Wilhite told The New York Times in 2012. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘jif.’ End of story.”

Wilhite invented the format during a time when CompuServe wanted to display graphs, drawings and simple animations in an era of slow dial-up internet speeds, Yahoo News reported.

He worked on it for a month before the format was released in July 1987, according to the Times.

“He invented GIF all by himself -- he actually did that at home and brought it into work after he perfected it,” Kathaleen Wilhite told The Verge. “He would figure out everything privately in his head and then go to town programming it on the computer.”

“Without the .gif, the internet as we know it would be a different place,” Jason Reed, the art director at the Daily Dot, told NPR. “It’s a tight medium that you can learn a lot about storytelling within, especially tuned for the attention span of the internet.”

Jimmy McCain, who co-founded the artist collective known as Mr. GIF, said it was “incredibly saddening” to learn of Wilhite’s death.

“Forever in his debt; it was by the power of his GIF codec, that I traversed across the United States of America, smoked drugs with celebrities, and created friendships with countless amounts of people along the way,” McCain told NPR. “Even to this day, GIFs help put food on the table for my family, and for that, I will always be eternally grateful to Stephen Wilhite.”

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