The GIF turns 39: from CompuServe to today's memes

On 15 June 1987, a CompuServe programmer named Steve Wilhite published the specification for an image format nobody expected to last decades. The GIF — Graphics Interchange Format — was created to solve a prosaic problem: transmitting colour images over 2,400 bps modems without choking the connection. Today, 39 years on, it is still the lingua franca of memes.

The problem the GIF solved

CompuServe, in 1987, was one of the largest online networks in the United States, long before the web existed. It was a commercial dial-up service — think of a paid proto-internet where people exchanged files and messages through slow terminals.

The problem: the image format CompuServe used until then was monochrome. Wilhite was tasked with creating something that supported colour and still fitted through the bottleneck of the era's modems. The solution was to use the LZW (Lempel–Ziv–Welch) compression algorithm, which shrinks colour images without discarding data — lossless compression, in the technical jargon.

The result was GIF87a, released on 15 June 1987. It supported up to 256 simultaneous colours and compressed images with large areas of uniform colour particularly well. For the web that was to follow — thanks to Mosaic and later Netscape — it was the ideal format for illustrations, logos and banners.

GIF89a: when the format learned to move

In 1989, CompuServe published a revision, GIF89a, with two additions that changed everything: transparency support and, more importantly, frame-based animation. Each frame could have its own delay, creating the direct ancestor of the animated memes that dominate WhatsApp and Telegram today.

Back then, animation inside an image file was the stuff of science fiction. GIF89a delivered it in something any web browser could render without a plugin. It was Flash before Flash — and far lighter.

The patent crisis that nearly killed the GIF

In 1994, Unisys announced that it held the patent on the LZW algorithm used internally by the GIF. The company began charging licence fees to software makers implementing the format.

The open-source community's reaction was immediate: the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) project was born, created explicitly to replace the GIF without patent encumbrance. PNG supported more colours, true transparency (an alpha channel) and better compression.

The LZW patent expired in the US in 2003 and across the rest of the world by 2004. The GIF survived — and so did PNG, each with its own niche. PNG took logos and screenshots; the GIF kept the animations. Each format won the ground it already dominated in practice.

Why the GIF outlived PNG, WebP and MP4

Technically, the GIF is inferior to practically every format that came after it. MP4 compresses video far more efficiently. WebP does everything the GIF does in a smaller file. Even so, the GIF persists — and dominates.

The reason is distribution and historical compatibility. Any platform, from the mid-1990s onwards, renders a GIF with no extra configuration. That holds for email, Slack, WhatsApp, old forums and static sites. The format became a social protocol as much as a technical one: "sending a GIF" is a cultural act that goes beyond the file itself.

On the same date, 35 years later: Internet Explorer was retired

On 15 June 2022, Microsoft officially switched off Internet Explorer 11, after 27 years of operation since IE 1.0 in 1995. The announcement had been made in May 2021, but the execution date was exactly 15 June — according to Microsoft's own blog.

IE dominated the browser market through the 2000s, reaching 95% market share, before losing ground to Firefox and then to Chrome. For anyone who developed for the web in the 2010s, IE was a synonym for compatibility hell: each version interpreted CSS and JavaScript slightly differently, forcing a cascade of hacks and workarounds.

If the GIF is a legacy that survived on its own merits, IE is a legacy the web needed to free itself from. Unlike the trajectory of Winamp, which took decades to be resurrected, IE was explicitly buried — and the web is better for it.

What 15 June leaves behind in the history of the web

Thirty-nine years of the GIF and four years since the death of IE. On a single date, the web lost its most feared browser and celebrates the most resilient format in digital history. As we discussed when covering the history of the World Wide Web since its release into the public domain in 1993, formats and tools that solve real problems tend to persist far beyond anything a reasonable projection would suggest.

The GIF was created to survive slow modems. It ended up surviving entire generations of technology, a patent crisis, technically superior competitors and the death of its own creator — Steve Wilhite died in March 2022, three months before IE. He never budged on one thing: the correct pronunciation is JIF, not GIF. The entire world disagrees. That debate is never going to die either.