GIF Creator Steve Wilhite Passes away

Steve Wilhite, the man who created the popular GIF file format in 1987, died on Monday in the ICU after suffering from COVID-19 complications at the age of 47, media agencies reported on Thursday.

Wilhite was infected by the virus two weeks ago, and he was hospitalized near his home in Milford, Ohio, his wife, Kathaleen told NPR.

She said: "It came on suddenly. He woke up one morning and he said, ‘Honey, I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good at all."

“And he was running a fever, throwing up so badly. And then the next day he started coughing badly,” she added.

Regarding the death day of her husband, the wife said that she received a phone call from the hospital last Monday, and the hospital's staff told her that she come urgently.

Her husband died shortly after she arrived, describing: "It’s just so bad. It’s just so tragic."

The late computer expert invented the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) while working at CompuServe in the late 1980s.

It is based on using simple animation and fast downloaded formats and it became widely emerged on the internet, and it be more popular by the creation of MySpace before it was heavily engaged with users' comments and posts on leading memes with the beginning of 2010.

Now, GIFs are commonly used in everyday life, and people started to use such formates easily and flawlessly.