The internet has given us many things over the years. Memes. Chat forums. An endless flow of sometimes useless, sometimes amazing information.
It also gave us a new place to talk about and share music... And it gave us the GIF.
Now there's a site that combines those last two things in brilliant ways.
It's called Music History in GIFs, and it's just that: a survey of mid- to late-twentieth century music, as told through a series of amazing, 8-bit-style GIFs.
The site was created by Josh Carrafa, who is a musician himself (he's a member of Brooklyn prog-punk band Old Monk).
It features an (indie-leaning) look at the last 50 or so years of popular music (starting with The Beatles' appearance on the Ed Sullivan show).
Each GIF is accompanied by a little bit of text explaining that moment in music history, plus a link or two so you can get educated.
As awesome as the animations are, it's also a great way to do a little musical time travelling. If you've got some time to kill, visit the site and get lost in the awesomeness.
And if you don't know what a GIF is, it's really just an image format for a picture (like a JPEG).
Nowadays, GIF has become shorthand for the kind of images on this page: a simple animation made up of a series of images.
The GIF (it stands for Graphics Interchange Format) was first introduced by CompuServe way back in 1987, but it's become really popular in the last few years.
In fact, the Oxford Dictionaries named "GIF" as its Word of the Year for 2012 (at least in the U.S. - Britain's Word is "omnishambles").
Related:
I'LL TUMBLR FOR YA: Amazing Photos, GIF Jokes and Animals (Both Adorable And Creepy)
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