I wrote a Perl program at home that would just need an input of graphical commands to generate the GIF file. That was gifc, which was later on released to the world (on August 30, 1998). However, when Unisys was enforcing its GIF patent, the Internet was turning away from GIF images (remember the "Burn all GIFs" day at November 5, 1999). Therefore, from release 4.0 on, my program did not generate GIF images anymore, but PNG images. It was therefore renamed to imc , in anticipation of supporting more image types in the future. In fact, starting from release 4.1, JPEG output is also supported. Later, the patent storm cleared, and now imc again supports GIF images (starting from release 4.3).