Stephen Wilhite, the creator of the looping animated image format, the GIF, died earlier this month.
Wilhite’s death was confirmed in an obituary, which stated the former chief architect of America Online died on March 14 — just days after his 74th birthday on March 3. He died of Covid, Wilhite’s wife, Kathaleen, confirmed.
Wilhite began his career at Compuserve, the first major commercial online service provider.
In 1987, while at Compuserve, he created the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) in order to compress images to make then accessible for early modem speeds.
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