Guess who turned 30 today? You will be so surprised!

​I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my favorite file format – the GIF turned 30 today! Yes, you read that right! GIF has been around us for 30 years and is a millennial – woohoo!

If you were born in the '80s, you are probably trying to recollect the first GIF you ever saw! For me, it was the dancing baby!

The GIF was traditionally released as an 8-bit color image format in 1987 as a result of a problem Developer Steve Wilhite and his team looked to solve - how to make a computer display an image while also saving memory. The solution? A Graphics Interchange Format (GIF).

GIF inventor Steve Wilhite

In 2012, GIF was named word of the year and in 2013 Steve Wilhite received the lifetime achievement award at The Webby Award. While most people associate GIFs with annoying memes, GIF has contributed a lot more! Few examples include:

• Enhancing product illustrations
• Depicting visual Instructions
• Demonstrating UX for apps
• Displaying pictures as cinemagraphs
• Adding pop to social media pages 

They say, GIFs didn't just shape the internet — it grew up with it. Today, GIF has a personality of its own and has made communication simple. Like all digital media creations, GIF serves its consumers needs well and has thus thrived with the growth of the internet. 

If you want a deep dive into GIFs, check out Historyofthefgif.com 

P.S - Facebook celebrated the birthday of this mighty format by announcing the global rollout of a feature which enables GIFs in Facebook comments. Yaas!

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/gif-turns-30-ancient-format-changed-internet/