The image just above is an ani­mat­ed GIF, a for­mat by now old­er than most peo­ple on the inter­net. Those of us who were surf­ing the World Wide Web in its ear­li­est years will remem­ber all those lit­tle dig­ging, jack­ham­mer­ing road­work­ers who flanked the per­ma­nent announce­ments that var­i­ous sites - includ­ing, quite pos­si­bly, our own - were "under con­struc­tion." Charm­ing though they could be at the time, they now look impos­si­bly prim­i­tive com­pared to what we can see on today's inter­net, where high-res­o­lu­tion fea­ture films stream instan­ta­neous­ly. But tech­no­log­i­cal­ly speak­ing, we can trace it all back to what this par­tic­u­lar ani­mat­ed GIF depicts: the phenakistis­cope.