The History of GIFs

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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You find them everywhere. They are on personal and business websites, home pages, emails and just about anywhere else you can stick them. They have been around since 1985, but how much do you actually know about this little (aggravating) graphics interchange format?

On early webpages, the average two-minute YouTube embed would have required about 40 minutes of buffering. So instead, people rocked the eyeballs and dinosaurs.
 
Matthew Rader believes the GIF fits extraordinarily in a web environment that never takes itself too seriously.
The other side of that is when these animated gifs are used too often, then we have an environment that doesn't take itself serious enough
 
*get's popcorn ready...*

C'mon guys, post'em :)

frog.gif
 
Lacking due to no sound, but this pretty much solidifies my feelings on the matter

tumblr_mbt0or84IK1qglgtco1_500.gif
 
I wonder now: What would [H] look like with animated GIFs as a background like in the days of Geocities?

Imagine a rotating [H] symbol in the background repeated from top to bottom...
 
One catch is that it misses plenty of the early years. In the beginning, GIF was used a "graphics interchange format" for sending pictures. Eventually JPEG popped up with 24 bit color and superior compression (GIF is only lossless for grayscale and pictures drawn using less than 256 colors, actual photographs require heavy dithering). Note that jpegs requires plenty of multiply-adds and can take 2-3 times as long to display a good 8-bit picture. It was almost worth the extra download time on a 2400pbs modem for the gif.

While the battle was pretty much over when the web took off (seemingly the start of history to this article), there were still plenty of holdouts who either liked the old format or were clueless. GIF has become just the silly animation file the article claims, but that wasn't always the case and a "history of GIF" should acknowledge that.
 
Isn't this the one that had all the legal bullshit happen a decade or so, and after that no one gave a shit about it?

Anyway... Not sure where I picked it up, but it defines the daily life of IT pretty well:

frustrated.gif
 
So let's clear the air:

Jiff, or
Giff (hard G)

Being as it's an acronym, it can be pronounced either way :p

NASA
NahSuh
NahSaw

Same deal, there is no "correct" way to say it, regardless of what the inventors of it say.
 
Isn't this the one that had all the legal bullshit happen a decade or so, and after that no one gave a shit about it?

Anyway... Not sure where I picked it up, but it defines the daily life of IT pretty well:

frustrated.gif

Yep, that's the one. A history of the issue:

A: Lemple and Ziv invent dictionary-based compression 1977-78.
B: Welch makes some improvement to lz78, thus lzw (1984)
C: compress implements lzw, and fills in whatever holes Welch missed.
D:* Unisys patents B, thus owning C (and any use A that happens to use lzw). Must have been within one year of B.
E: Compuserve establishes the GIF file format (1988-89). The file format is defines an 8-bit pallet and a stream of 8 bit values, then uses lzw to compress them. Note that lzw is pretty hopeless for compressing graphics, but it probably helps more during animation. GIF took off long before animation became important.
---
much later (mid 1990s): Unisys declares "all your GIF are belong to us". Threatens everybody with patent lawsuits. Entire web moves to PNG (and any lollygaggers move to JPEG for actual photos), GIF forgotten.

* note that "Unisys" must have been either Univac or Sperry at the time. Also lzw was pretty early for a software patent (RSA and arithmetic compression were a few years earlier).
 
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