Who is credited with inventing the GIF format?

Steve Wilhite is credited with inventing the GIF format.

Wilhite was an American computer scientist and engineering lead at CompuServe, where his team developed GIF in 1987. CompuServe needed a practical color-image format for its online service, replacing an older black-and-white image system. Wilhite is therefore commonly identified as GIF’s creator or inventor, while recognizing that the format was produced by a broader CompuServe engineering team.

The original GIF specification was released as GIF87a on June 15, 1987. The format used palette-based color and Lempel–Ziv–Welch compression, allowing images to be transferred more efficiently over slow modem connections. CompuServe later released GIF89a, which added transparency and animation-related controls.

Wilhite also became associated with GIF’s pronunciation debate. He supported the soft-G pronunciation, like “jif,” and displayed that preference while accepting a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. The attribution question is sometimes confused with the technology behind GIF: LZW compression was developed by Abraham Lempel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch, but that does not make them inventors of the GIF format itself.