Stephen Wilhite, creator of the GIF, has died 56 It’s pronounced ‘jif’ https://www.theverge.com/2022/3/23/22992066/stephen-wilhite-gif-creator-dies
Many years ago I had 1 semester class I took with Abraham Lempel, one of the inventors of the LZW (he is the L in the name) dictionary compression used by GIF - it was an absolutely boring and complicated class (error correcting codes) which I took only because it was an opportunity to take his class as he was lecturing that semester. LZW was developed as a mistake, they were really trying to increase entropy which helps with error correcting codes for network transmissions, and better compression basically ensures entropy (otherwise there are patterns which can be compressed) - so they invented one of the leading lossless compression algorithms as a side effect of their primary research. Interesting how these things work.
I swear the guy only created the controversy so people would know he existed. There's simply no way that it's pronounced Jif. It stands for Graphics Interchange Format. Do we pronounce Graphics with a soft G? Is it Jraphics? No. I really don't care what the creator says. He didn't create the English language.
