Computers and the internet had advanced, and the image capabilities of the GIF format could not accommodate these leaps in technology. GIFs reign as the most widely used web image format would come crashing down in the mid-90s.

Unlike the XBM file format, another type popular at the time that was limited to black and white, it would be able to capture the 8-bit 256 range of colors that was the standard. Based on the LZW algorithm, the GIF format could take a huge image and shrink it down to a small file size. The Graphics Interchange Format, or GIF, was the result of this work. He was tasked with finding a solution that would take a large image and decrease the file size. Steve Wilhite, worked as a computer scientist at CompuServe. They offered image downloads, but with most people using modems that worked at a mind-blowingly slow rate of 1,200 bits per second, there were considerable limitations in what they could offer.

In the beginning: there were GIFsīack in the days of dial-up CompuServe was the first major online service provider offering email and other services for personal home computer users. But the story of web-ready images starts four years before. The internet as we know it first emerged in the 1990s.