GIF is pronounced "GIF", says the author of the standard

Graphic format GIF last year turned 25 years old , but it still enjoys great popularity on the Internet. Animated GIFs are now experiencing a second youth: even Google recently launched a special filter for this type of file.

Not surprisingly, the day before the Webby Awards ceremony, a special award for "lifetime achievements" was awarded to GIF author Steve Wilhite. His photo on the right is from the magazine “Online Today” in October 1987, where an article about a new graphic format was published.

“GIF turned out to be an incredibly robust technology,” says David-Michel Davies, executive director of the Webby Awards, “Even with the spread of broadband access.”

Back in 1987, it was hard to imagine that GIF would be used primarily for animation and short videos, and even a quarter of a century later they would think of nothing better. At that time, they simply wanted to create a single format for the web, so that the pictures would be displayed equally on all computer platforms. This was a serious problem.
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Steve Wilheit worked for CompuServe, the first mass Internet provider in the United States. The company wanted to provide its users with graphic services via the web, for example, display a color weather map. Mr. Wilheit was fond of compression technology, so he decided to help. He imagined what the format should be, and after a month he rolled out a variant called the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format), it was June 1987.

New instantly became popular. Some experts stopped working on black and white graphics formats, all switched to GIF. In the standard, Steve Wilheit even provided for the possibility of animation with a single-frame display time from 0.01 s to 655 s.

In his life, Steve Wilheit did not make a single animated GIF, but he called his favorite work a dancing child from 1996.

Now Steve Wilheit retired, retired, built a house outside the city, enjoys photography and Java programming. He is proud of his brainchild - the format of the GIF - but it is terribly annoying that the debate about the correct pronunciation still continues. “The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes both pronunciations,” says Mr. Wilheit. - They are wrong. This soft ji is pronounced jif. There is nothing to discuss here. ”