Stephen Wilhite, father of the GIF , has passed away. He was 74 years old. It's impossible to imagine an internet without GIFs. By the time the World Wide Web became publicly available in 1993, GIF was already established as a popular image format because of its LZW data compression, which gave color images portability between software applications. Because they emerged around the same time, the GIF and the internet shaped each other throughout the 90s. The look of the internet would have turne…