History of GIFs
- by Natalia Tanner
What is a GIF you may be wondering?
GIF stands for Graphics Interchange Format. It was first introduced in the 1987s, where GIFs were used to transfer highly-compressed video files in 256 color bits per frame. It is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite.
Apart from supporting up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, it also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame. These allow palette limitations make GIFs less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other imagines with color gradients, but well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.
Another aspect that made Gifs essential is that they didn’t take up a lot of memory space at all.
The GIF Culture
Started when wider access through sites like Giphy, and Tumblr started integrating GIFs into their platforms as a form of entertainment. GIF culture sky-rocketed during the 2000s, with splinter groups appearing worldwide. This mega GIF boom gave birth to a diverse network of exciting communities and subcultures each creating their own GIFs throughout the era.
Early GIFs revealed two crucial things about the format:
- It was easy to pass around, no matter how many frames it contained
- It could be looped an infinite number of times for an infinite supply of delight.
According to my resources, the GIF below was the first one created
Kinda boring right? Welp, but thanks to GIFs creators and the evolution of the internet overall we have managed to create some pretty interesting/funny GIFs that are currently roaming the internet out there right now… P.S below are some of my favorite GIFs that I use regularly :)
Controversy in how GIF is pronounced
According to the GIF creator Wilhite, he pronounces his creation with a soft G, using a play on the peanut butter ad as a demonstration: “Choosy developers choose GIF”.
But this hardly settles the debate, you can’t make everybody agree on something such as this… many others still insist on the hard “g” as in the word “gift” but within the “t”.
This might as well be the longest controversial topic where nobody is going to know how to correctly pronounce it because ever dictionaries like Oxford English have unhelpfully declared both pronunciations valid.
Totally up to the person in how GIF is pronounced.
Essentially GIFs provided an overall cultural shift.
It became a way of communication between everyone everywhere. GIFs have become a mainstay in the internet culture, and a form of digital communications used everywhere from entertainment, the news, and advertising, to app onboarding and product instructions. Essentially the rise of smartphones can be the main reason for this shift, with the ability to consume content anywhere and everywhere on the go, GIF provided the ideal medium for communication.
How do they work?
Conceptually, a GIF file describes a fixed-sized graphical area (the "logical screen") populated with zero or more "images". Many GIF files have a single image that fills the entire logical screen. Others divide the logical screen into separate sub-images. The images may also function as animation frames in an animated GIF file, but again these need not fill the entire logical screen.
GIF files start with a fixed-length header ("GIF87a" or "GIF89a") giving the version, followed by a fixed-length Logical Screen Descriptor giving the pixel dimensions and other characteristics of the logical screen. The screen descriptor may also specify the presence and size of a Global Color Table (GCT), which follows next if present.
Thereafter, the file is divided into segments, each introduced by a 1-byte sentinel:
· An image (introduced by 0x2C, an ASCII comma ',')
· An extension block (introduced by 0x21, an ASCII exclamation point '!')
· The trailer (a single byte of value 0x3B, an ASCII semicolon ';'), which should be the last byte of the file
Resources
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/15/15802136/gif-turns-30-evolution-internet-history
https://itstheflashpack.com/the-lens/a-brief-history-of-gifs/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-gif-early-internet-innovation-ubiquitous-relic-180963543/