Stephen Earl Wilhite (March 3, 1948 – March 14, 2022) was an American computer scientist who worked at CompuServe and was the engineering lead on the team that created the GIF image file format in 1987. GIF went on to become the

de facto standard A ''de facto'' standard is a custom or convention that has achieved a dominant position by public acceptance or market forces (for example, by early entrance to the market). is a Latin phrase (literally " in fact"), here meaning "in practice b ...

for 8-bit color images on the

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until PNG (1996) became a widely supported alternative. The format later became the subject of a patent assertion by

Unisys Unisys Corporation is an American multinational information technology (IT) services and consulting company headquartered in Blue Bell, Pennsylvania. It provides digital workplace solutions, cloud, applications, and infrastructure solutions, ...

on its use of the LZW compression algorithm. Known as the inventor or creator of the GIF, Wilhite received a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013.

Biography

Stephen Earl Wilhite was born in West Chester Township, Ohio, on March 3, 1948, the son of Anna Lou (Dorsey), a nurse, and Clarence Earl Wilhite, a factory worker. Wilhite's team at CompuServe developed the GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) in 1987. Its adoption by the earliest web browser in 1991 helped make it a few years later in 1995 the most popular image file format. Twenty years later in 2016, the format still had mainstream use in website design, social media posts, workflow documents and how-to guides. Wilhite remained a CompuServe/ AOL employee into the first decade of the 21st century, working on a variety of CompuServe systems. These included CompuServe's wire protocols, such as Host Micro Interface (HMI) and CompuServe

B protocol The B protocol, or CIS B, is a file transfer protocol developed for the CompuServe Information Service, and implemented in 1981. The protocol was later expanded in the QuickB version (which was an asynchronous version of the standard protocol) an ...

for the

CompuServe Information Manager CompuServe Information Manager (CIM) was CompuServe Information Service's client software, used with the company's Host Micro Interface (HMI). The program provided a GUI front end to the text-based CompuServe service that was at the time access ...

(CIM); new service features in the early 1990s; Web chat software in the late 1990s; and investigating Web community models until his 2001 departure after suffering a stroke. Wilhite's name comes up frequently in debate over the pronunciation of the GIF acronym. "The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' accepts both pronunciations," Wilhite said. "They are wrong. It is a soft 'G', pronounced 'jif'. End of story." The intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand Jif. Wilhite died following complications from

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at a hospital in

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, on March 14, 2022, aged 74.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wilhite, Steve 1948 births 2022 deaths Scientists from Ohio CompuServe American computer scientists Computer graphics professionals Webby Award winners Deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic in Ohio People from West Chester, Butler County, Ohio