He got a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award
in New York in 2013, on the 25th anniversary of the GIF. He retired from
America Online as the principal architect. Wilhite is survived by Kathaleen,
his wife, as well as their children and grandchildren.
Today, the GIF is a ubiquitous component of
online life, a valuable tool for expression and communication. GIFs are
commonly used for reactions, messages, jokes, and animated online memes.
It's a little surreal to think of a
computer scientist in the 1980s creating the foundation for a veritable
language of short videos that would almost certainly be utilised by future
generations he would never meet.
However, Wilhite did not invent the format
for that reason. In the late 1980s, CompuServe offered them to allow
“high-quality, high-resolution graphics to be displayed on a variety of
graphics hardware”, and was “intended as an exchange and display mechanism for
graphics images”.
Those days, in comparison to what they are
now, internet speeds were sluggish. Dial-up connections were painfully slow,
and interoperability issues made image downloads much more difficult.
A report by The New York Times states that
Wilhite's first image was a picture of an aeroplane.
Wilhite's obituary states that “even with
all his accomplishments, he remained a very humble, kind, and good man”. He
enjoyed travelling and was an avid camper.
Wilhite's acceptance speech for the Webby
Lifetime Achievement Award was a GIF that he flashed on the big screen at the
event, where he iterated the pronunciation as “JIF”, and not “GIF”.
Here's how Wilhite used the awards event to
explain how to pronounce GIF:
Wilhite also told The New York Times in the
same interview that, “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both
pronunciations. They are wrong. It is a soft ‘G,' pronounced ‘jif.' End of
story.”
The Oxford American Dictionary named GIF
the word of the year in 2012, beating a number of other contenders.
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