XAnim and Cross-Platform Playback

1990

Newton's cradle as an animated GIF, the kind of small looping demo Unix users opened in XAnim through the early 1990s. Place: University of New Hampshire FTP site; later widely mirrored Figures: Mark Podlipec, author and sole maintainer Mark Podlipec releases XAnim in 1990 from his FTP site at the University of New Hampshire. It is a Unix command-line viewer that plays animated formats on the X Window System: GIF, FLI, FLC, IFF/ANIM, AVI, QuickTime MOV, MPEG, plus dozens of obscurer formats added over the years. The codebase is a single sprawling C project that compiles on any Unix with a frame buffer and Xlib. Through the early-to-mid 1990s, XAnim is the reference implementation for animated-GIF playback outside CompuServe's own Windows decoder. If a Unix workstation can display animation at all, it is because XAnim is installed. Sun, SGI, NeXT, HP-UX, AIX, every academic Unix box of the era. Podlipec maintains the codebase alone, releasing updates roughly monthly through 1996.