The original version of the GIF format was labeled '87a' and released on June 15th, 1987, soon followed by the 1989 release of its enhanced successor '89a,' which featured support for animation delays, transparent background colors and storage of application-specific metadata. commercial online service Compuserve in 1987 to provide a more robust format for the purpose of uploading and downloading color images, which replaced its earlier run-length encoding (RLE) format in black and white only.
GIF format was introduced by the first major U.S.