In June 1987, a small team at CompuServe in Columbus, Ohio, shipped a new image format called the Graphics Interchange Format. The lead engineer was Stephen Wilhite, and the first picture encoded in it, according to Wilhite’s own recollection, was an airplane. It was a test of whether a single image file could travel across dial-up lines, land on a machine made by a different manufacturer, and still look the same.

That was the whole point.

By May 2013, when Wilhite received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, GIF had already outlived the online service that produced it, the modems that shaped it, and most of the companies that once competed with it. The recognition came one year after Oxford Dictionaries USA named “GIF” its 2012 word of the year. Wilhite said in a 2013 interview that he “saw the format I wanted in my head and then I started programming.” At the Webby ceremony, he reaffirmed his preferred pronunciation with a five-word statement displayed onstage: It’s pronounced “JIF” not “GIF.”

What CompuServe actually needed in 1987

CompuServe was, in the mid-1980s, one of the largest commercial online services in the United States. Subscribers dialled in at 1200 or 2400 bits per second, browsed forums, downloaded files, and paid by the hour.

Images were expensive to move. The service already had a run-length encoding format limited to black and white, but it wanted something that could carry a colour image, compress it well enough to be tolerable over a modem, and render consistently on machines made by Apple, Atari, Commodore, IBM, and other manufacturers.

Wilhite’s team built GIF around LZW compression, derived from an algorithm Terry Welch published in 1984 and earlier work by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv. LZW was fast to decode on the modest processors of the day, and it compressed the flat blocks of colour common in early computer graphics particularly well. The format supported as many as 256 colours in a single image.

The GIF87a specification, dated June 15, 1987 and still hosted by the W3C, defines a signature, screen descriptor, colour maps, image descriptors, compressed raster data, extension blocks, and a terminator. The document also shows that the original format could store more than one image in a data stream.

The airplane, and what the record actually shows

Wilhite told the New York Times that the first image he created in the new format was a picture of a plane. He did not present it as a work of art or a public announcement. It belonged to the format’s development process.

The original test image does not appear to survive in a public archive with confirmed provenance. What survives is Wilhite’s account, given decades later, and the specification he and his colleagues published. The airplane should therefore be treated as the inventor’s recollection of the first GIF rather than as an artefact readers can independently examine today.

What is documented is the June 1987 specification date, the compression method, and the fact that GIF spread far beyond CompuServe during the following years.

Why the format spread, and then would not die

When the World Wide Web arrived in the early 1990s, browsers needed image formats they could reliably display. GIF was already established across major computer platforms, and its compression suited the small buttons, banners, icons, and diagrams from which early web pages were built.

The GIF89a revision, published in 1989, added a graphic control extension that could specify transparency, frame-disposal behaviour, and a delay measured in hundredths of a second. Multiple images were already permitted by GIF87a, but the new timing controls made sequenced animation practical.

Continuous automatic looping was popularised later through Netscape’s application extension in 1995. Animated GIFs soon appeared as spinning “under construction” signs and blinking email icons, even though the format’s palette limits and frame-by-frame storage could produce large files. Better-designed animation formats came and went. GIF stayed.

In the 2010s, Tumblr, Reddit, messaging services, and GIF libraries such as Giphy helped turn short, silent loops into a common form of online reaction. Many modern platforms actually convert uploaded GIFs into video internally, but users still call the resulting clips GIFs. Make Tech Easier’s guide to creating and editing GIFs shows how thoroughly the name now covers an entire class of looping images.

The patent fight almost nobody remembers

GIF’s dominance was nearly derailed by its compression algorithm. Unisys held patents covering LZW, and in December 1994 it and CompuServe announced that developers of certain commercial GIF software would need licences. The reaction across the early web was sharp. Developers began work on a royalty-free replacement, and the result was PNG, which became a W3C Recommendation in 1996.

PNG provided more colour depth, variable alpha transparency, and, for many indexed-colour graphics, better compression than GIF. The W3C describes it as a patent-free replacement for GIF, while Make Tech Easier’s image-format comparison explains the practical differences among GIF, PNG, and JPEG.

The original PNG format did not support animation. That left GIF with a role PNG could not immediately fill. The relevant Unisys patent expired in the United States on June 20, 2003, with patents in other major jurisdictions expiring by 2004, and the licensing threat disappeared. The W3C’s comparison of GIF and PNG records that patent timeline.

The pronunciation argument

Wilhite remained consistent: soft G, pronounced “Jif.” He told the Times that the CompuServe team had played on the peanut butter brand’s slogan with the phrase “choosy developers choose GIF.” When he received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013, his five-word acceptance statement appeared on the screen behind him: It’s pronounced “JIF” not “GIF”.

The counterargument is straightforward. The G stands for Graphics, which begins with a hard G, and many English speakers consequently pronounce the acronym that way. Merriam-Webster lists both pronunciations, so ordinary usage never obeyed Wilhite’s ruling completely.

Wilhite died on March 14, 2022, at 74, after contracting COVID-19. His New York Times obituary quoted his wife, Kathaleen, saying he had developed the format at home and later devoted part of his retirement to model trains.

What the format quietly built

The GIF is a strange survivor. It was designed for a network that no longer exists, uses a compression method that once provoked a patent dispute, and remains limited to 256 colours per image. It has repeatedly been declared obsolete. Its replacements have often been technically superior, yet none has erased it.

Part of the reason is the same reason CompuServe wanted it in the first place. A GIF file is self-contained, broadly supported, and does not require the viewer to start a conventional video player. Drop it into a message and it moves.

The rest of the reason is cultural. A three-second silent loop, taken from a film, television programme, or stray moment and captioned by strangers, became one of the web’s most portable units of expression. Wilhite built the container for a test picture of an airplane. Decades later, the pictures inside it are still repeating.