GIF restrictions and problems with various release of 9x?

[Ludwig Von Cookie Koopa]

So I need to downgrade, to another image viewer. I was reading, dew to the legal of GIF, many companies released

alternative versions of GIF. The original GIF was lost, to public use. I want to know if that is true, since I need to make real files and not GIF that is unreadable by X_machine ( late eighties, earlier ninties, Apple, etc ).

I see there is also variations of the TIFF format that is ( was ) sappose to be close to raw. For which there is like many RAW formats now.

Like needle in a hay stack, by reading the discriptions in the file names.

Edited September 29, 2009 by Ludwig Von Cookie Koopa

[osRe]

There are no different variants of GIF (other than the two standard ones: 87 and 89, 89 being used for animation). There was a patent a few years ago, now-expired, but that doesn't mean programs created "alternative" GIFs, just that some avoided GIF support or were leaning toward PNG.

Edited September 29, 2009 by shae

[Ludwig Von Cookie Koopa]

Which GIF standard is the original, that was used before 1990?

[osRe]

87 came before 89, and both were in theory available before 1990.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format