On December 24, 1994, Compuserve and Unisys tried to give themselves a Christmas gift and make the Internet pay for it. They announced their plans to charge royalties on the GIF file format, which, at the time, was a staple of early web development.
Origins of GIF
Originally, GIF was a file format developed by CompuServe so they would have a cross-platform graphics format their subscribers could use to share graphics online. The format caught on and proliferated throughout online services and bulletin boards. Almost anyone who was online prior to the World Wide Web becoming popular downloaded at least one GIF file at some point. GIF was free for anyone to use, as far as CompuServe was concerned.
When the World Wide Web came along in the early ’90s and made the Internet friendlier and more accessible to all, GIF was one of the graphics file formats it supported. It was widely understood. It had widespread software support. GIF gave excellent compression on images that didn’t originate as photos, and it decompressed and rendered faster than JPEG. In fact, the web supported GIF before it supported JPEG.
It was unusual to visit a Web page in 1994 and for it to not have at least one GIF image in it. Early web designers used them to provide graphical elements to break up the wall of text, but we also used them in more subtle ways. One example was using them as a background pattern. By default, the Web was black text on a gray background. Designers would make patterns to make the background a little more visually interesting than one of 216 solid background colors. Technically, any computer on the Web could display at least 256 colors, but there were 216 of them that were always the same regardless of browser and platform. Creating seamlessly repeating textures that used combinations of those 216 colors was an easy way to dress up a Web page in the early days.
Why Unisys could charge royalties for GIF
The problem keeping GIF from being truly free was that it used a compression algorithm, Lempel-Ziv-Welch, or LZW, that was still protected by a patent. When it was just private individuals sharing images with each other, nobody really cared. CompuServe wasn’t aware of the patent at the time it used LZW. But once it started looking like people would start using the Internet for commercial purposes, those patents became a problem. Of course the patent holder, Unisys, was going to try to monetize that.
Commercial graphics software was already paying a royalty on the patent, so it wasn’t necessarily a huge deal for someone using commercial graphics software to create their Web page. They were already indirectly paying royalties for GIF.
But software that didn’t cost anything was another problem. Most software of that type stopped supporting the file format. The authors of those types of programs probably weren’t paying royalties for GIF. And you couldn’t really tell from looking at a web site which software produced the GIF.
When Unisys announced owners of non-commercial and private web sites had the “opportunity” to obtain a license for a one-time payment of $5,000 or $7,500, there was understandable backlash. Unisys became the most hated company on the Internet, for a time.
The compression tool Gzip was another result of this patent fight, as an alternative to a Unix tool that used the same patent GIF did.
The invisible GIF hack
One of the key uses of GIF in the early days was something you literally couldn’t see. Early HTML didn’t give a lot of control over the text. You could change the font, you could boldface some or all of it, and you could do the same for italics and underlining, and you could change the size. But you didn’t really have the degree of control over it that graphic designers were used to having in other media.
The trick was to use a single pixel transparent GIF file as a spacer. You could drop that image anywhere on the page and specify a height or width in pixels to force white space there. It was a trick to change the line spacing in your text or to put a variable width space somewhere in your text if you wanted it.
I don’t know who invented this technique. I read about it in a book titled Web Sites that Work by Roger Black and Sean Elder. Here’s a blog post I wrote about that back in 2002. I had at least two different people tell me about Black’s book within 30 days of each other. I had a friend who worked in a bookstore, so he used his employee discount to get me a copy.
It wasn’t long before everyone I knew was using that trick on their web pages. It was a cool trick. But it wasn’t worth paying five grand for the privilege to use it on a web page you weren’t monetizing.
It also wasn’t terribly long before HTML matured to the point where you didn’t need hacks involving invisible GIFs to adjust line spacing and position elements on a page. I just got out of the habit of using GIFs at all. When I did need a graphical element, I just used JPEG or PNG and got on with life.
I think a lot of other people did the same, so it’s likely the GIF patents didn’t turn into the revenue source everyone expected.
GIF’s comeback in the 21st century
Unisys’ patents expired worldwide in 2003 and 2004, but IBM held a relevant patent that didn’t expire until 2006. While few really expected IBM to take the hard line Unisys had, given IBM’s problems with SCO, there wasn’t much reason to take chances. On October 1, 2006, that final IBM patent expired. GIF was free for any and all use. No more threat of GIF royalties.
Not long after that last patent expired, animated GIFs came back with a vengeance. It was a convenient file format for sharing short videos on social media. Animation was the one thing GIF did that PNG didn’t. Animated versions of PNG such as APNG existed, but Internet Explorer didn’t support them. Internet Explorer did support GIF, so GIF became the cross-browser animated file format standard by default. When Edge switched to Chromium, it supported all of the file formats Chrome and Firefox did, but GIF had momentum by then. With no financial incentive to switch, GIF stuck this time.
Today it may seem hard to believe that the file format virtually vanished from the Internet for about 10 years. We’re still arguing how to pronounce it though.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.