Back in the 1980s, Stephen Earl Wihite was a programmer at a company called CompuServe, an early provider of, among other things, home internet service. This was around the time I met my husband who convinced me to spend my aunt’s $3,000 inheritance on a personal computer. It had half the computing power (and none of the sex appeal) of a Casio digital watch. It would be at least a decade before I would see that much money again at one time, but he wore glasses with red frames, and introduced me to Brian Eno. I was smitten. What’s a girl to do?
While at CompuServe, Stephen Wilhite developed a method for moving graphics across phone lines. This was in early, early days – AOL was less than five years old. If a text file is a shot of tequila, an image file is a whiskey barrel of Jack Daniels. Mailing a letter versus shipping a 1987 computer your husband bought with all your money.
A file extension, the part after the .) to know what to do with it. Adobe Acrobat’s extension is .pdf and when you click on Resume.pdf file, your computer knows to open Acrobat to view the file.
Steve’s gave his extension the name Graphics Interchange Format. Meet dancingbaby.gif. For unknown reasons this specific gif became wildly popular and was even on a famous TV show named something that was about some law firm. Felicity? If you find this image creepy, you are not alone. Keep in mind that white men were pretty much the only thing around (who got credit) back in the neanderthal days of the Internet, so there you go. Wait until they start sending porn around – oh wait, they already did, ten seconds after the file format went live.
At the 17th Annual Webby Awards in 2013, inventor Steve Wilhite used his five-word acceptance speech for his Lifetime Acheivemnet award settled the debate.
It is impossible to underestimate how much of the internet was created and innovated based on men’s need to see pornography. The minute it was possible to send dirty pictures from place to place without paper being involved, access to these images (then films, then live women, then anime) became the tent pole (ha ha) of the men’s human rights platform.
