The History Of Animated GIFs

Ever wandered where the craze began that led to animated images of Nigel Thornberry as Disney princesses in your Tumblr feed?  Look no further than the Animated GIFs: The Birth of a Medium, a rather in-depth and hugely informative six and a half minutes of the history behind some of the strangest imagery on the internet.

The origins of the Graphics Interchange Format are traced from it's inception in the late 80s, through the Netscape browser-related explosion in popularity for the animated graphic in the 1990s, the lull of its existence in the transition between web 1.0 and web 2.0, all the way to re-ignition of post-modern cultural significance in 2011-2012.

And even after all of that, they still can't decide whether its pronounced "gif" or "jif."

Source: Off book (Youtube)