Visuals like emojis and GIFs can make up for the useful cues that are often missing from digital chit-chatting: the raise of an eyebrow, the shrug of the shoulders, the rolling of an eye. But a new ...

Steve Wilhite invented the GIF in 1987 to drip-feed the first color photos onto grindingly slow computers. Those computers and the slow internet connections they were tethered to have gone the way of ...