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The Untold Story of the Creation of GIF At CompuServe In 1987 (fastcompany.com) 43

Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story: Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor....

GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.

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The Untold Story of the Creation of GIF At CompuServe In 1987

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  • no fucking shit....
    why the fuck is this even in the subject heading..
    it was 40 years prior....
    again....why is it mentioned..

    • by Chas ( 5144 )

      News
      For
      Nerds

      Most of the people here haven't made the conversion to naked political partisan yet.
      So, likely, this article about the history of one of the most successful filetypes in computing history is NEWSWORTHY.

      • So, likely, this article about the history of one of the most successful filetypes in computing history is NEWSWORTHY.

        News is, you know, what's new. This is what's old, and further, there is literally one fact in this story that was not already in Wikipedia.

        This article is NOT NEWSWORTHY. It's not even news. Further, the article purports to be about the history of the creation of GIF, but it spends dramatically more space talking about how the format has been used since its creation than it does talking about its creation... which per the headline, is what it's supposed to be about. Therefore it is not only not newsworthy,

      • Most of the people here haven't made the conversion to naked political partisan yet.

        I seriously doubt that. People do that by the time they are out of high school now, and this site doesn't have anyone under 40 on it.

  • This guy is a legend and you don’t even get his name right.
  • Did anyone else come here thinking they read “GIF of creation” in the headline, and hoping to see the Big Bang?

    Not enough coffee today, I guess

  • Look, if you rip all the expository bullshit out of that article, it essentially doesn't exist. Let's see if we can make a list of all the facts in this article which are actually related to the creation of GIF, it shouldn't take long.

    • [Steve] Wilhite [...] is the man who gave us a graphics file type called graphics interchange format, better known as GIF.
    • he was a software engineer at CompuServe[...]. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander âoeSandyâ
    • Wish I had mod points to up vote you. Great analysis of the article and you save me wasting time bothering even looking at it
    • by MS ( 18681 )

      Most likely "the team" was a single person. The GIF algorithm is not that complicated you need a whole team to work on it.

      I'm a software developer myself, an I often write or speak "we" did this and that, when in reality I'm a single person and using the plural only to give my work more importance.

      • The GIF algorithm is not that complicated you need a whole team to work on it.

        Sure, it's pretty simple stuff, especially the original basic format. But that doesn't mean multiple people didn't wind up working on it anyway. Unfortunately WP does not offer any relevant citation for the team claim. The citation nearest it is to the spec [w3.org] which doesn't provide any insight.

  • CompuServe was a pioneer in so many ways. Forums and chat were predecessors to what we now see in Facebook groups and dozens of instant messenger predecessors. Newsfeeds. Shareware marketplaces.
    I am highly nostalgic for this version of the pre-internet as I learned to code by finding folks that helped me get started on Visual Basic in one of the CS forums. Sold a bunch of shareware and made my first grand, which I re-invested to do marketing for my software and incorporate my company (I was 15). The
  • I have wondered about an annoyance with all Linux distributions I have used (Ubuntu based in recent years, but also before that with SUSE and Fedora) - the standard file viewing tools installed do not allow you to save GIFs. You can open them, but if you want to rename and save (which you can do with JPG, PNG, etc.) the tools says that it is not supported. It isn't because to the GIF patent, which expired on June 20, 2003. I find bug reports in various repos/bug report sites going back more than a decade, i

    • by kriston ( 7886 )

      It isn't because to[sic] the GIF patent

      Historically, it is. That ship had sailed with the rise of PNG. Along with that, using the read-only (and unencumbered) libungif was good enough almost nobody cared about saving GIFs anymore.

      Then animated GIFs came into the mainstream, and since many of these programs didn't do animation, there was virtually no point in supporting GIFs since PNG had been mainstream for two decades.

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