[Coco] . Gif

[Allen Huffman]

Did Compuserve ever release an official GIF viewer for the TRS-80 Color Computer?

Who created the first one for the CoCo? I do recall seeing a GIF for the first time, but I don’t remember if it was on a CoCo.

A C64 riend of mine had moved on to an Amiga, and was hired to write a GIF viewer for some company. When he was digging in to the specs, he discovered it could handle animation. During rendering, it could redraw areas of the screen. He searched and searched trying to find something that did that, and showed me the one he found. It drew a woman’s face, and then made her wink.

Years later, we had animated GIFs all over the early internet. Then they went away. Then some social media service made them popular again.

But I always think back to that original “winking face” example my friend Mark showed me back in Lufkin, Texas.

		— A