Citizenship United States Name Steve Wilhite Nationality American Fields Computer Science | Institutions CompuServeAOL Known for GIF | |
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Influenced Graphics Interchange Format Notable awards Webby Lifetime Achievement | ||
David karp presents steve wilhite with the 2013 lifetime achievement award at the 17th annual webbys
Steve Wilhite of CompuServe was the engineering lead on the team that adapted the GIF file format, which went on to become the de facto standard for 8-bit color images on the Internet until PNG became a viable alternative. Steve Wilhite developed the GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) in 1987. By 2016, the format had found mainstream use in website design, social media posts, workflow documents and how-to guides.
Contents
- David karp presents steve wilhite with the 2013 lifetime achievement award at the 17th annual webbys
- David karp presents gif inventor steve wilhite with webby lifetime achievement award
- Biography
- References
David karp presents gif inventor steve wilhite with webby lifetime achievement award
Biography
Wilhite remained on the CompuServe/AOL payroll into the first decade of the 21st century, working on a variety of CompuServe systems. These included CompuServe's wire protocols, such as CompuServe Host-Micro Interface (HMI) and CompuServe B protocol for the CompuServe Information Manager (CIM), new service features in the early 1990s, Web chat software in the late 1990s, and investigating Web community models until his departure after being disabled by a stroke. He has since partially recovered.
Prior to work with CompuServe Information Manager he ran a team that created compilers and run-time systems for use on the DECsytem-10 computers that were the major computing platforms used by CompuServe. Most notable were the Fortran and BASIC compilers and run-time systems and a substantial library called "BTOOLS" to support BLISS programming.
Wilhite's name comes up frequently in debate over the pronunciation of the GIF acronym. “The Oxford English Dictionary accepts both pronunciations,” Mr. 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.
