> It was at Netscape Communications where Gelobter first began working on the development of the GIF.

> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.

Looks like the GIF was invented by CompuServe in 1987?

> CompuServe introduced GIF on 15 June 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas. This replaced their earlier run-length encoding format, which was black and white only. GIF became popular because it used Lempel–Ziv–Welch data compression.

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

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drcongo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Non-animated though - there's a section on animated gifs coming out of Netscape in your link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF#Animated_GIF

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vlovich123 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> In September 1995 Netscape Navigator 2.0 added the ability for animated GIFs to loop.

> To enable an animation to loop, Netscape in the 1990s used the Application Extension block (intended to allow vendors to add application-specific information to the GIF file) to implement the Netscape Application Block (NAB).

VS from the article:

> Lisa Gelobter, a computer scientist who helped shape the modern web by leading the team that developed the animation technology used to create GIFs.

So this person worked on looping the GIF at best, not the animation technology itself. This is a bad look taking credit away from the person who actually did the hard work behind GIF, Steve Wilhite & his team at Compuserve. Netscape certainly made GIF animations popular by introducing the loop - prior to that basically no one used the animated GIF for the prior 6 years before the loop.

The annoying part of the article is making it seem like a technical accomplishment instead of a UX / product / marketing one.

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drcongo 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Ahhh, I see. Thanks for clarifying!

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650 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

She was Director of Program Management, which is different from Product Management as well. You can google what a program manager usually does, and its usually not inventing things or technical work.

	▲	AnimalMuppet 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"Invented" as in being the first to ask "is there a way we could...?" Most likely not "invented" as in "created the first working prototype".

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frumplestlatz 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

GIF89a (1989) already supported animation; the only thing Netscape added was the ability to specify how many times the animation should repeat.

They used the format’s support for application extension blocks to add a uint16 repetition count.