We may know them now as one of the best ways to communicate and express emotions/sentiment online, with short animated images baked into everything from Facebook to smartphone keyboards, but while gifs have always held at least some basic animation functionality, that aspect of their use didn’t really take off until the 1990s when early web browsers began supporting the feature.

Advertisement

Friends, former colleagues and family have been posting their memories of Wilhite on a memorial page, a reminder that while he was most well-known for his work on one of the most important aspects of the modern internet, his contributions over a long career spanned everything from user interface work to “web chat software.