On June 16, 1987, the GIF file format made its debut. That’s right, GIF predates the modern Internet. The first web browsers supported GIF because it was already very popular in the early 1990s and well supported.
The problem GIF solved at its 1987 debut
GIF neatly solved a very real problem. In 1987, people wanted to use their computers to create graphics and share them with others. But sharing graphics among different computers was nearly impossible. Most computers had very similar resolutions. But their color palettes varied dramatically, both in the number of available colors, and the appearance of those colors. The Commodore 64 and Tandy 1000 both had video modes with 320×200 resolution and 16 colors. But they didn’t use the same 16 colors. Someone with an Amiga, Atari ST, or IBM PS/2 could theoretically view Commodore 64 graphics and render them pretty accurately, since they all had much larger color palettes. But they needed software to interpret the Commodore 64’s graphics file formats. And that didn’t help you if you wanted to go the other direction.
GIF was a cross-platform graphics format that, with the appropriate viewer, would render the image on your computer as best it could, regardless of the computer it was created on. After converting it to GIF, an image created on a Commodore 64 could be viewed on any other computer with a GIF viewer. And an image created on a computer with a high-color palette could be viewed on a C-64 as well. It wouldn’t be perfect, but GIF would map the colors as best it could. Compserve, an online service, invented the format. And it spread quickly from there.
My initial reaction to GIF
I remember reading about GIF soon after its release. I got my first modem in 1987, so I was eager to try it out. The C-64 GIF viewer may have taken me until sometime in 1988 to find so I could actually experience it. I don’t have any trouble remembering my initial disappointment. The files were bigger than the native C-64 formats, which is understandable. But the viewers were slow. Downloading the image took time. How good the downsampled image looked in the C-64’s palette could vary. But worst of all, it could take 10 minutes to render the image. The downsampling took a lot of CPU power.
I downloaded a few random images and viewed them, and the novelty wore off quickly.
The experience was much better if you had a faster computer. A friendly BBS sysop invited me over once to show me how GIFs worked on a PC. He had a 286 that he used as his daily driver, and an XT clone that he ran his BBS on. The 286 had VGA and the XT had CGA. He pulled a GIF up on the XT and it rendered in garish CGA cyan, magenta, black, and white. It looked awful, but it took less than a minute to render. So you could get an idea of what the image looked like even if you only had 4 colors to work with. On his 286 it was great. Images loaded and rendered fast enough to cycle through them like a slide show. And with 256 colors to work with, they looked exactly how they were intended to look.
Not long after that, I got my Amiga. A VGA image didn’t always look perfect on the Amiga, but depending on the viewer, it could look pretty good. And it was much faster than my initial experience on the C-64.
GIF and the World Wide Web
Moore’s Law marched on, bringing us ever faster processors, and by the time Tim Berners-Lee was getting the idea for the World Wide Web, the CPU wasn’t the bottleneck anymore. Your modem was. GIF allowed you to add images and animation to your web pages, for better and for worse. A lot of the early animated GIFs could be pretty annoying. And it wasn’t long before advertisers figured out they could animate their banner ads to fit 4-5x as much information in that small space, and distract you from the rest of the page while they were doing it.
It was all well and good until Unisys decided to monetize its patent in 1994, which was its right, but that didn’t go over well. Rather than pay the royalty, GIF largely disappeared for about a decade. The final GIF-related patent expired October 1, 2006, making GIF free for all to use again. It came back because for animations, it was the only format that all the major browsers supported in 2006. Momentum is a hard thing to overcome, so GIF remains in use today. That’s why animated memes use a nearly 40-year-old file format.
Today people of a certain age think of GIF as a video format, but that’s largely a post-2006 development. Originally, we used it mostly for static images. But 21st century software exists to convert other video formats to GIF quickly and easily, so today GIF gets used for short video clips without audio more than anything else.
GIF still works for static images too, but since other formats such as PNG make smaller files and render just as fast on modern CPUs, there’s usually not much reason to use GIF for static images anymore.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.