“We were together every day from that day,” she said. Wilhite said their first date was at a Cracker Barrel the year before they married. The couple married in 2010, when they were both in their 60s. “Steve loved the pine trees in the north, and I love the ocean, so that gave us a big span.”. They traveled from their home in Milford, Ohio, to the tip of Florida and to the Grand Canyon, she said.

Wilhite said that her husband also loved to spend time outdoors, and that they went on many camping trips with her son Rick, who she said was one of Mr. Wilhite building model-train bridges in his upstairs office.

That hobby, his wife said, was supposed to be confined to the basement of his home but spilled into other rooms, with Mr. Wilhite retired at 51 after having a stroke, but he kept busy using his computer programming skills to augment his model railroad. “Then he signed it Steve Wilhite, and he said, ‘Google it,’” Wilhite to write a letter to the teacher to confirm the story. When one of his granddaughters, Kylie, told her computer teacher that her grandfather had invented the GIF, the teacher did not believe her, Ms. Wilhite’s wife said, he captured the history of his invention in a three-page document that he shared with his children and grandchildren. His father, Clarence Earl Wilhite, was a factory worker his mother, Anna Lou (Dorsey) Wilhite, was a nurse. Stephen Earl Wilhite was born in West Chester, Ohio, on March 3, 1948. Wilhite cited as one of his favorites, as well as popular apps like Giphy. The technology inspired the famous “dancing baby” GIF in 1996, which Mr. The technology’s appeal expanded from computers to smartphones, giving the famous and the not-so-famous the ability to share GIFs on platforms like Twitter and Facebook and eventually to create their own loops. They called it a GIF, short for graphics interchange format.

The format they created was a type of compressed image file with an ease of use that made it enduring. Wilhite was working for CompuServe, the nation’s first online service, he led a team of engineers who revolutionized how people could share video clips on the internet. She said the cause was complications of Covid-19. His death, at a hospital, was confirmed on Thursday by his wife, Kathaleen Wilhite. Wilhite, the computer programmer best known for inventing the GIF, the looping animation format that became a universal language for conveying humor, sarcasm and angst on social media and in instant messages, died on March 14 in Cincinnati.

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