Stephen E Wilhite The Man Who Invented Gif Passes Away At 74

While GIFs have become popular amongst general internet-treaders only in the recent past, the Graphic Image Format (GIF) was invented way back in 1987 by a team of engineers at CompuServe. It was led by the American computer scientist Stephen E. Wilhite, who is deemed as the inventor of GIF. Unfortunately, Wilhite succumbed to COVID-19 last week and passed away in his hometown of Milford, Ohio.

Stephen Wilhite worked as a lead engineer for CompuServe in his early years. He helped develop various systems at the company, including CompuServe’s wire protocol like Host Micro Interface (HMI) and the CompuServe B protocol for the CompuServe Information Manager (CIM).

Talking about her husband, Kathaleen Wilhite told The Verge that Stephen was surrounded by his loved ones until his last breath. His obituary page mentions that “even with all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man.” As per Kathaleen, Wilhite was the proudest of the creation of GIF. Wilhite was also fond of camping and traveling and spent most of his time doing so after the retired in the 2000s.

“They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,’ pronounced ‘Jif.’ End of story,” Stephen added to settle the debate once and for all.