Stephen Wilhite’s Net Worth At The Time Of His Death

This is one of the questions that people ask the most about Stephen Wilhite’s net worth, and although they always end up answering it on other pages with an “I don’t know, you know” or “it depends” if there are some estimates that various web portals mention.



Stephen E. Wilhite was an American computer scientist. Stephen Wilhite‘s net worth is estimated to be around $1.2 million USD at the time of his death. We have estimated Stephen Wilhite’s net worth from salary, money, income, and assets. However, No one knows the real answer to this question, what is Stephen Wilhite’s net worth except for the personage.



 Name Stephen Wilhite
Age 63 years
Nationality American
Date of birth March 3, 1948, United States
Occupation Engineer, Computer scientist
Died March 14, 2022
Spouse(s) Kathaleen
Awards Webby Lifetime Achievement
Net Worth $1.2 million
Last updated 2022

Stephen Wilhite Died

He has left us a legend. Steve Wilhite, the engineer who led the development of the GIF format while working for CompuServe, died of COVID-19 on March 14, The Verge has confirmed. He was 74 years old.

Wilhite and his team introduced GIF (Graphic Interchange Format) in the late 1980s. The image format, which supports eight bits per pixel with a palette of 256 colors, was not created with memes in mind, but rather to distribute high-resolution graphics and other simple images, such as logos, in a lossless compressed format.

“He invented the GIF on his own,” his widow, Kathaleen Wilhite, told The Verge. “He did it at home in private and took it to work after perfecting it. He would come up with the formula in his head and then go into town to program it into the computer.”

Steve Wilhite retired in the early 2000s after suffering a stroke. He spent his retirement traveling, camping, and building model trains in the basement of his house. He was aware that the GIF format had become a fundamental part of the Internet thanks to its ability to reproduce animated images. The achievement was recognized with a Webby Award in 2013. Wilhite used the ceremony to defend that GIF is pronounced: “yif”.

In his obituary, colleagues from the defunct CompuServe remember him as a hard-working person and fundamental to the success of the company. CompuServe was acquired by AOL in 1998. AOL allowed the patents on GIF to expire, making it an open format in the public domain. What happened next… is history (insert dancing baby GIF here).

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