What is this business about her role in GIFs? She helped invent Macromedia Shockwave.... Not remembering any kind of connection between those things... I mean, animated GIFs were already a thing that popularized on their own.... nothing to do with Shockwave really. Just both contributing at the same time to popularizing or encouraging the use of animation on the web, yeah?

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js2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

̶N̶e̶t̶s̶c̶a̶p̶e̶ ̶a̶d̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶i̶m̶a̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶G̶I̶F̶s̶. Edit: Netscape added looping to animated GIFs per reply. She apparently led that effort. The press is misreporting her actions as having invented GIF in the first place, which is wrong. That happened at CompuServe in 1987.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Animated_GIF

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frumplestlatz 4 hours ago | parent [-]

GIFs already had animation. Netscape added an animation loop counter.

For a rough idea of the complexity involved, when I wrote a GIF decoder and renderer a few decades ago, implementing the loop counter extension took me about 10 minutes.

	▲	js2 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Thanks, updated comment. I had misread the GIF wikipedia page.

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jtokoph 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don’t have access to the article, so I’m basing this response solely on your comment. I wonder if the author thinks all animations on the web are called GIFs. So being part of creating one of the early methods of publishing animations on the web (Shockwave) confused the author.

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mbrumlow 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think somebody is trying to push a narrative. A now deleted post was pointing to this

https://seattlemedium.com/lisa-gelobter-the-trailblazing-com...

And I can see how maybe the author of the post this entire thread is about could see this and just roll with it.

For the record the link I post seems to be entirely and completely wrong, and if I had such a post written so factually wrong about me, all while trying to take credit where none was owed, would be so embarrassing.

But we live in a strange new world where we can just fabricate anything we want and back fill websites and probably pollute AI with nonsense just to push political agenda and gain favor in the masses who ether are ignorant or don’t care to ever know the truth.

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lkbm 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's interesting to poke around and see how the game of telephone works.

The first mentions I saw on Twitter were from February 2018[0]. Subsequent Black History Months[1] would reiterate how she invented GIFs or sometimes animated GIFs. You even get crazy things like how she invented the animated GIF while working with the Obama administration[2]. (That post references an article that talks about her working with the Obama administration that doesn't mention GIFs[3]. The author just merged the two things she's credited with.)

In 2024, the story is that she invented the GIF at Netscape[4], which obviously makes little sense. It could be a reference to GIFs looping, but I see no evidence for that, especially since her LinkedIn[5] doesn't say she worked at Netscape. She worked at Macromedia, which involved work with Netscape, and I suspect the genesis is her work on Shockwave during that time (2005-2010), and that was taken to be a precursor to animated GIFs (obviously false, but an easy mistake for someone young and non-technical. Maybe it's a cultural precursor to modern animated GIF usage in people's minds?)

Overall, though, this is a pretty dumb thing for them to claim, even if the claim is widespread across the Internet these days. She was roughly 17 when animated GIFs were first developed.

As I said, it's interesting to see how the game of telephone plays out. I don't think anyone involved in this was intentionally spreading false information, and I don't really expect random Twitter users to fact-check carefully. I would like NYT to put some effort into it. As it is, we now have a NYT touting an obviously-false claim when she actually did a lot of really important and impressive stuff they could focus on instead. There's no need to spread fake accolades for her. Her actual contributions stand on their own.

[0] https://x.com/Reel365/status/960288180447694848

[1] https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A... / https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A... / https://x.com/search?q=%22Gelobter%22%20%22gif%22%20until%3A...

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:share:7034543821...

[3] https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2022/08/18/computer-scientis...

[4] https://seattlemedium.com/lisa-gelobter-the-trailblazing-com...

[5] https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisagelobter/details/experience/

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lkbm 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Addendum: In the paragraph after merging Shockwave and GIFs, NYT references a Forbes interview[0] where she specifically says she didn't invent GIFs.

NYT:

> Ms. Gelobter was the director of program management at Macromedia where she helped develop Shockwave into a web plug-in that allowed for video games and animation on the web, turning still images into moving GIFs — animated images known as a graphics interchange format.

Interview linked in the very next paragraph:

> Gelobter: I want to clarify that I did not create GIFs although I get credited for it a lot. I think people conflated thinking about animation on the web as being animated GIFs but that was Shockwave. Again, what we did with Shockwave was transformative.

[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jumokedada/2021/02/18/meet-the-...

	▲	ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Good note, thank you for highlighting

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leephillips 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The NYT seems to have an interest in making Mamdani and his administration more palatable to their readers:

http://lee-phillips.org/nytIHRA

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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ChrisArchitect 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The misinformation around this is ridiculous. There's a bunch of articles, written more recently than not, that all make some kind of unfounded claim that Shockwave lead to GIFs or GIF animation. One of them is the source for the line in the Wikipedia article that makes a similar claim. The Wikipedia doesn't even mention her working at Netscape ever either. Brutal.