Pixelated black and white airplane in flight on a dithered background, an early GIF image

Gif

1987image formatclassic

Published August 24, 2026

The GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a bitmap image file released by CompuServe on June 15, 1987 that supports short looping animations. It moved from GeoCities-era clip art to the reaction-image language of Tumblr, Twitter, and every modern chat app.

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Overview

The GIF, short for Graphics Interchange Format, is a bitmap image file that supports up to 8 bits per pixel and a palette of up to 256 colors per frame, and it can chain multiple frames together into a short looping animation4. It's the format behind the tiny silent clips that fill comment sections, group chats, and reaction threads across the internet3. Because it's lossless and compressed, it handles flat graphics, logos, and cartoons cleanly, but struggles with the wider color range of a photograph1.

For a stretch of the mid-1990s and 2000s the GIF was treated as a punchline, tied to spinning 'under construction' signs and dancing hamsters plastered across GeoCities pages4. It re-emerged in the 2010s as a shorthand for emotional reactions online, powering Tumblr fandoms, Twitter replies, and the built-in GIF pickers in Facebook Messenger, iMessage, and Slack3.

Origin & Background

Platform
CompuServe (1987) / Netscape Navigator (viral spread)
Creator
Steve Wilhite
Date
1987

CompuServe, the first major U.S. commercial online service, released the original GIF specification (labeled '87a') on June 15, 19872. It replaced an earlier black-and-white run-length encoding format that CompuServe used to ship images over slow modem links1. Lead developer Steve Wilhite built it under Alexander 'Sandy' Trevor, then CompuServe's chief technical officer1. In a 2012 interview with the Daily Dot, Wilhite recalled that the first GIF ever produced was a picture of an airplane1.

The '89a' spec followed in 1989, adding transparent backgrounds, per-frame timing delays, and slots for application-specific metadata blocks5. Those additions set up the animated GIF format that would take over the web a few years later1.

How It Spread

Animated GIFs took off after Netscape Navigator 2.0 shipped in the mid-1990s with the auto-loop feature that let a GIF cycle inside a web page without user input5. Wilhite later told the Daily Dot that 'if Netscape had not added GIF in their browser, GIF would have died in 1998'1. Other browsers followed, and by the late 1990s the format was everywhere on personal home pages, most famously on GeoCities, where blinking icons and animated dividers gave the whole aesthetic a reputation for tackiness2.

That reputation stuck long enough that some designers avoided the format entirely. GIF artist Jason 'shooper' Reed told the Daily Dot that in 1997 he saw GIFs as 'god-awful clip-art in motion clustered on to a seizure-inducing GeoCities nightmare'3. The comeback started in the late 2000s, when Tumblr made it easy to reblog animated loops, and picked up speed once mobile tools like Cinemagram, 3Frames, and GIFShop let people cut YouTube clips into shareable GIFs from a phone3.

By the format's 25th birthday on June 15, 2012, the Daily Dot commissioned 19 GIF artists including Chris Torres (creator of Nyan Cat) and Olia Lialina to make commemorative animations3. The Verge ran its own retrospective the same day2, and Gizmodo called the GIF 'catnip for the Internet' in a birthday post4. Five years later, on the 30th anniversary in 2017, Twitter user Doug McKenzie posted a candidate first animated GIF and the tweet cleared 2,600 likes within a day; Twitter built a Moments page around the format on the same date5.

How to Use This Meme

Making a GIF usually means either exporting frames from a short video clip or drawing them frame by frame, then setting a delay between frames and a loop option3. Mobile-era apps like Cinemagram, 3Frames, and GIFShop popularized the workflow by letting people rip a YouTube clip into a GIF from a phone3. Most casual users never make one from scratch and instead pick a reaction clip from libraries like GIPHY or Tenor through the GIF button built into Messenger, iMessage, and Slack4.

Cultural Impact

Wilhite is nearly as famous for a pronunciation argument as he is for the format itself. He insists the acronym should be pronounced 'jif,' as in the peanut butter, citing a Graphics File Formats FAQ from 1997 and a running joke that 'choosy developers choose GIF'1. Most English speakers still say it with a hard G, and the debate is reignited by every anniversary piece4. Wilhite worked at CompuServe through the 1990s and retired after a stroke; AOL acquired CompuServe in 1998 and eventually let the GIF patents expire1.

Boing Boing ran a 2008 piece on 'GIF News,' a pixel-art newsletter distributed over BBSes back in 1988, framing the format as a genuine folk medium of the pre-web era6. By the time of the 25th and 30th birthdays, institutions including Cornell University had started preserving GIF art, with Olia Lialina's early web work as a headline example3. Urban Dictionary keeps the definition breezy, calling a GIF 'basically, a short moving picture'7.

Fun Facts

The first GIF ever produced was reportedly a picture of an airplane, according to inventor Steve Wilhite1

Wilhite argues the correct pronunciation is 'jif' like the peanut butter, and cites a 1997 Graphics File Formats FAQ as backup1

GIF replaced an older black-and-white run-length encoding (RLE) format that CompuServe used for images over dial-up1

Cornell University has preserved animated GIF art by early web artist Olia Lialina3

A pixel-art newsletter called 'GIF News' was distributed over BBSes starting around 1988, years before the web hit the mainstream6

Frequently Asked Questions