Cashing in on GIF by charging royalties

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.

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 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.

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