On June 15, 1987, Trevor and his team, which included inventor Steve Wilhite, released an enhanced version of the GIF called GIF87a. The new format allowed the creation of compressed animations using timed delays.
It wasn’t until 1994 that the GIF89a became an endlessly looping moving-image file via an additional block of code introduced with the browser Netscape 2.0. In 1998 AOL ,who had purchase Netscape that same year, allowed the GIF patents to expire, leaving the format open to the public domain.
The very first GIF depicting an airplane was presented by CompuServe in 1987. In 1989 the gif format allowed for 256 colors and endless looping as seen in one of the earliest animated gif of a macintosh computers, as shown.