Stephen Wilhite, inventor of the meme-favorite GIF, has died

His spouse, Kathaleen, mentioned Thursday in a cellphone interview that he died of COVID on March 14.

Wilhite, who lived in Milford, Ohio, gained a Webby lifetime achievement award in 2013 for inventing the GIF, which a long time after its creation grew to become omnipresent in memes and on social media, usually used as a cheeky illustration of a cultural second.

Wilhite was working at CompuServe in 1987 when he invented the GIF. “I noticed the format I needed in my head after which I began programming,” he advised The New York Instances in 2013, saying the primary picture was an airplane and insisting that the file had just one pronunciation – a smooth “G,” like Jif peanut butter. These utilizing the laborious “G,” as in “received” or “given,” “are incorrect,” he mentioned. “Finish of story.”

In that interview, he mentioned the ’90s-era dancing child GIF is a favourite of his.

“There’s far more to him than inventing GIF,” Kathaleen Wilhite mentioned of her husband, who liked trains, with a room devoted to them within the basement of their home with “huge prepare tracks,” in addition to taking tenting journeys. Nonetheless, even after he retired in 2001, “he by no means stopped programming,” she mentioned.