March 24 (UPI) — Stephen Wilhite, one of the people behind the invention of the GIF image format, has died in Ohio, his wife announced. He was 74.
Wilhite died on March 14 after a being hospitalized with COVID-19, Kathaleen Wilhite told NPR and The Verge.
“It came on suddenly,” she said. “He woke up one morning and he said, ‘Honey, I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good at all.’ And he was running a fever, throwing up so badly. And then the next day he started coughing badly,” she said Wednesday.
Kathaleen Wilhite, who also had the novel coronavirus, had her husband, who went by the name “Steve,” taken to a hospital near their home in Milford, Ohio. There he was placed into a coma and put in intensive care.
She said she was able to be with him when he died.
“It’s just so bad. It’s just so tragic,” she told NPR.
Steve Wilhite is best known for creating the GIF, or graphics interchange format, while he worked for CompuServe in the 1980s. Now used mostly on social media and other messaging services as a way to share memes or jokes, the GIF was originally created to distribute “high-quality, high-resolution graphics” in color in the early days of slower Internet.
In 2013, he won a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the industry. The Webbys recognize excellence on the Internet.
Nearly a decade ago, he settled a debate — one that’s still ongoing in some corners of the Internet — about the pronunciation of GIF. People on one side of the debate say it should have a hard-sounding “g,” like the first word of the acronym, “graphic,” while others insist it should be a soft, “j” sound.
“The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Steve Wilhite told The New York Times in 2013. “They are wrong. It is a soft ‘g,’ pronounced ‘gif.’ End of story.”
Funeral services for Steve Wilhite were held Tuesday in Milford. He is survived by his wife, son, four stepchildren, 11 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
