The Graphics Interchange Format was a technological solution developed by Stephen Wilhite.

• In the 1980s, Wilhite was the lead engineer on a team at CompuServe tasked with finding a way to quickly distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color.
• Developing ...

• With the rise of GIFs came a historic internet debate: whether it’s pronounced “gif” (with a hard G, like “gift”) or “jif.”
• In 2012, Oxford American Dictionaries named “GIF” its US Word of the Year, accepting both pronunciations.
• In 2013, Stephen Wilhite...

The most ubiquitous platform for GIFs today is Giphy, used by 700m+ people and said to come 2nd only to Google in search engine activity.

According to Giphy, the 1st GIF ever uploaded to the internet, by Stephen Wilhite himself, was of a plane over rolling clouds.