Everyone knows GIF. (Although not everyone knows it was supposed to be pronounced ‘Jif’, just like the peanut butter!) You have all seen the short looping animations that fill the Internet, the funny videos, the reaction GIFs: crying James Van Der Beek, flailing Kermit, Michael Jackson eating popcorn. (Even though technically, most of these clips are not GIF files anymore.) You may have heard that there is a lot of porn being distributed as GIFs today. (But we will not go into that here.) And some of you will remember the old days: the crappy animated logos, the spinning globes, the flying mail envelopes, the rippling flags and flickering flames of the infant Web when GIF ruled the browser. ‘GIF 1.0’ is what they call it to differentiate it from the newer, cooler ‘GIF 2.0’ of social media, mobile gadgets and cultural memes. But few people know that there was also a ‘GIF 0.0’, a GIF before the WWW. Created in 1987, GIF predates the public Web by four years, the Netscape Navigator by seven years and the explosive growth of the Internet by a whole decade. What was GIF in those ten years before Yahoo!, the browser wars and the dot-com bubble? I will try to give you an idea by presenting and discussing some of the earliest surviving GIF images and by telling you about my book project on the Forgotten History of Early Networked Images.