"He changed the Internet forever."
In Harry Potter, magic moves a photo in a newspaper, but in the real world, if you want to move the people in the picture, you probably need to use a special image format, GIF.
"GIFs" are like magic in the online world
This morning, stephen E. Wilhite, one of the main inventors of the GIF image format, died of COVID-19 on March 14 at the age of 74. His wife confirmed the news in an interview and revealed that "everyone in the house was with him when he left." ”
In 1987, At home, Willhead created the first GIF image in the history of the Internet — an airplane in the air:
Today, GIF has a history of 35 years and is one of the most frequent image formats on the Internet. Because the most intuitive feature of GIFs - "movable", the amount of information it can transmit is much higher than that of still pictures, thus making it a carrier of a large number of memes and memes.
But 35 years ago, Wilheit didn't create it to make pictures move, but to have a small, compressible, universal image format that works for all computers.
In 1987, as a programmer, Wellhead worked for a network service company called Compare, when the home computer market was divided up by many companies, including Apple, IBM, etc., and each company's computer followed its own image format, which brought great inconvenience to the information processing at that time.
In addition, due to the network transmission speed at that time, if you want to transfer a picture remotely, it often takes a long time.
So at the behest of the company, Wellhead and his team eventually developed an image format called "Graphics Interchange Format", or "GIF" for short. The original GIF could be adapted to most computer models on the market, and had the advantages of "compressible and small size", plus it was the only format that could display color pictures on web pages at that time, so it was widely used as soon as it was born.
But compared to the countless memes born in the GIF format, its inventors are more concerned about the pronunciation of the word "GIF".
The pronunciation of "GIF" has been controversial. On foreign social media, "GIF" has two pronunciation forms, one is soft /d/, the other is hard /g/, both of which have a large number of supporters, and have a great taste of "sweet and salty dispute" in domestic tofu brain.
A foreign manufacturer of peanut butter once produced two kinds of peanut butter with different packagings based on the pronunciation of "GIF", so that customers who support different pronunciations can buy products that meet expectations:
Even the rigorous Oxford Dictionary has struggled with the pronunciation of the word, and in order to remain neutral, the dictionary specifically states that both pronunciations of "GIF" are correct, but its inventors do not think so.
In 2013, Wielhead won the Wibby Lifetime Achievement Award for inventing the GIF image format, and when he took the stage to receive the award, he specially prepared an animated short film to tell the audience the correct pronunciation of the word:
To use Chinese to pronounce it, it is roughly "sawfu"
In 2000, the retired Willhead officially retired, and according to his wife's description, in his later years, he liked to assemble model trains in his bedroom and camp in the wilderness.
When the bad news of Willhead's death came, many Internet media and netizens began to mourn the father of GIFs, one of which read: "He changed the Internet forever."
"Honor him by sharing your favorite GIF"