It wasn’t CompuServe that had the patent. The gif format uses LZW, which was patented by Unisys. I remember having to get a special option on some vendor’s tool

It wasn’t CompuServe that had the patent. The gif format uses LZW, which was patented by Unisys. I remember having to get a special option on some vendor’s toolkit to unlock the GIF handling. Either an add on or you had to go license from Unisys.