The History of GIFs

GIFs have flashed across many a webpage, flickered within millions of MySpace profiles and glittered among innumerable Tumblrs. You've spotted them in animated advertising, email signatures, web forums and social avatars. Indeed, if I had to repurpose the acronym for "GIF" it would be "Great Internet Fun."

In fact, "GIF" stands for "graphics interchange format," a mature name for an image format just coming of age in the digital space (the GIF turned 25 this year). Specifically, Steve Wilhite of Compuserve debuted the GIF in June 1987. The GIF improved on black and white image transfers with 256 colors, while still retaining a compressed format that slow modems could load easily. Usin…
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