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The Graphics Interchange Format is thirty-eight years old and refuses to die. A chronicle of the medium, from CompuServe in 1987 to the post-TikTok afterlife. Every card is a moment. Many of them animate.
On 15 June 1987, Steve Wilhite and a small team at CompuServe ship a new image format. They call it the Graphics Interchange Format. It compresses with LZW (which will become a patent problem), supports 256 colors, and (in the 1989 revision) animates by chaining frames in a single file.
The web takes it everywhere. Geocities under-construction signs. The dancing baby. The hampster dance. The reaction GIF as social vocabulary. Giphy as company. Meta-acquired-then-FTC-unwound. The pronunciation wars. And, after 2020, the slow eclipse by short-form video.
Each folio is a moment, told plainly, with sources. An oracle, trained on the corpus, sits at the bottom of every page.