The History of GIFs
By Frederick A. Hasney IV
GIF - A lossless format for image files that supports both animated and static images.
The use of GIFs has become so common in recent years that most of us can probably have entire conversations over text with our friends or family using only GIFs. These short, looping animated images have created a completely new form of language that covers pop culture references, emotional expressions, and typography-based messaging. Many of us can most likely think of some of our favorite and most used GIFs of the top of our heads, for me it has to be the Michael Scott “No!” and Shaq’s shimmy dancing. Whether it is to emphasize an emotion or provide context to action, GIFs allow people to expand upon text-based messaging by furthering meaning through visual representation. In many cases, the individual receiving the GIF does not have to know the author, creator, or source material to understand the message that is being conveyed to them. The power behind and the wide-spread usage of these animated images is immense, but where did they even get their start? How did this cultural phenomenon go from a simple file format for compression to what it is today? Let’s take a look at the history surrounding GIFs and how they have become one of the most widely used file formats on the Internet.
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The Past Inspiring the Future
To better understand where the appeal in GIFs comes from, it is important to note the popular visual technologies of the past, particularly the 19th and early-20th centuries. While technologies from this time period, such as the praxinoscope from 1877 and the mutoscope from 1895, were not used in the same manner that GIFs are today, they all share the same commonality in the “limitation of storage”. Additionally, these revolutionizing technologies allowed for illustrations to display animals and people to a single viewer for the purpose of entertainment or educational purposes. While these inventions were ground-breaking for their time, they did not have the same sort of cultural impact on mainstream thinking that GIFs seem to have in today’s time. To provide a closer relative to the GIF, public advertisements in the form of “spectaculars”, or better known as electric animated signs, feature many of the foundational qualities that appeal to mass markets. Their flashy, repeating nature and emphasis on a specific quality of the brand helped to connect with audiences in a way that had never been done before. All of these technologies laid the foundation for appeal in looping, visual content that would later be utilized by creators of GIFs.
The Creation of the GIF
The initial version of the GIF, or Graphics Interchange Format, was released under the name GIF 87a in 1987 by developer Steve Wilhite who worked for the technology company CompuServe. The intent behind its creation was to figure out a way to allow for a computer to display an image while also saving computer memory in the process. This was achieved by designing the format to display the image information as it was being received, and this format would allow for multiple images to be saved within the same file to free up memory by removing redundant data. While this did solve the problem that CompuServe had set out to accomplish, this version of the GIF format was still far from what we recognize as the format today.
This, however, was changed when Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch set out to revolutionize the format by developing a compression algorithm, called Lempel-Ziv-Welch, that allowed for lossless compression of the image files meaning they could be concatenated together to create a looping video. This method was first put on display with the original example of a looping weather map.
Around 1995, a problem began to arise for the LZW algorithm and all of the developers that utilized it due to a company by the name of Unisys Corp. technically being the patent owners of the algorithm. Suddenly, the company was looking to charge a royalty on any software that used the compression algorithm, including TIFF, PDF, and GIF. Interesting, this was one of the major motivating factors for the creation of the file format of PNG that is still widely used today; moreover, it was originally called PING to stand for “Ping Is Not Gif”. Following the implemented changes, the community of developers decided that November 5th, 1999 would be considered “Burn All GIFs Day” where they would cease using the format and delete all existing copies of the format. While this did not have widespread adoption, it still was a major moment in Internet history where developers staged an organized protest of practices regarding an algorithm and lead to the usage of GIFs being largely phased out for static images.
Modern Uses
Even though GIFs became an unfavored format for static images, the file type still was unbeaten in one major area: animated images. To this day, according to W3tech, GIFs are the most shared file format on the Internet beating out JPEGs and PNGs. With websites like GIPHY and Tenor, the Internet is filled with animated images of almost anything a person could think of or need. GIFs are also so popular due to their compressed nature allowing them to take up much less bandwidth than other video or animation formats making them much more versatile and web-friendly. Interestingly, in 2014, Kevin Zeng Hu and Travis Rich, researchers from MIT Media Lab, teamed up for the project named GIFGIF that was aimed at quantifying the emotional responses that individuals experienced when being shown GIFs. From its data, which is at over 3.2 million responses and counting, the emotions that were linked to the specific GIFs have proven to be extremely accurate and consistent across a wide range of users. This study has further proved that GIFs are becoming a new form of communication that is accessible across various demographics making it one of the more universal forms of language. To conclude, GIFs have had a long development history that has been quite inconsistent; however, currently, this file format is the leader of the sharable file formats and continues to expand into new markets, such as marketing and advertising.
