Wilhite died last week on Monday, just 11 days after his birthday. The world media reported on his death only now that his wife Kathleen had sent them information. She also said that the famous programmer succumbed to coronavirus.
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For The Verge, she also recalled her husband’s greatest glory. In the 1980s, Wilhite worked as a senior executive at CompuServe, and his team was responsible for creating the GIF format.
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“But the truth is that GIF was invented by himself. He was working on it at home when he came home from work. He only brought him to the office when he had everything perfected, “Kathleen said.
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Along with the JPEG format, GIF is currently one of the two most widely used image formats in the world. In the 1990s, its strengths were absolutely crucial. The Internet was so slow at the time that it took several minutes to load images, depending on their size and the speed of the telephone line.
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At that time, the GIF allowed the image to be displayed faster, initially in poorer quality, but gradually focused. Currently, GIF is most often used for fast sending of extremely short videos and funny moving animations.
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The GIF format was undoubtedly Wilhite’s greatest invention, but he had far more contributions to the modern Internet – during his career, for example, he worked on various user interfaces and web chat software. In 2013, he received an award at the Webby Awards for his lifelong contribution to the Internet.
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