Gratitude Day 10: GIF

Continuing my "Unsung Heroes, Human and Algorithmic" subseries in my September Gratitude series, I want to talk about GIF, the venerable and stalwart Graphics Interchange Format. First of all, a little housekeeping: It's pronounced JIF, like the brand of peanut butter. If you insist on pronouncing it like you're having a stroke in the middle of saying "gift," please feel free to leave the room now. I'll wait. Ok, now that we've booted the riff-raff, let's get down to business. GIF was developed by CompuServe and released in 1987 as a compressed, cross-platform (hence the "interchange" part of the name) image format for general-purpose use, and particularly for sharing over online services that were connected to over modem. Most younger folks probably won't appreciate how advanced GIF's compression is, but I remember it taking a minute or two to decompress a 320x200 GIF on my 8MHz Macintosh SE back in the day. I might be partially conflating decompression time with dithering time, but…