Twenty years from that to this? That's a pretty long time without anyone doing anything with this technology then (this doesn't sound much more advanced than what you did back then, except for the addition of internet and gifs).
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I think it's neat this service finally exists!
My personal theory is, that it was tumblr's original arbitrary limit of 512KB (now 1MB) that elevated GIF content's artistic quality to new levels.
Before there were all kinds of GIFs, but mainly unedited direct frame sequences out of movie files, yet there was no need to keep the files small. Yet if you wanted to see them in your dashboard stream in their full animated glory, the GIFs had to be kept under that limit at all costs.
Creative workarounds were found (minimizing frames/short loops/masking out static parts of the image) to create outstanding rebloggable content worth sharing.
If tumblr didn't have that limit, I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be seeing the current GIF-renaissance, maybe reaction-GIFs, but for sure not stuff like:
Thanks for this! This thought has been stewing in my head for a while too. Like, for example, cinemagraphs are a creative invention forced by the constraint of the GIF format (ie, tumblr and imgur's size limit means playing to GIF's strengths, like only animating regions of images).
We've also heard from working with Mr. Div and Patakk and the others that sometimes they do hacks to maximize their oomph. For Patakk, sometimes his geometries don't take up the full 500px so that he can pack more motion in a smaller area (and so for our art prints, he's filling out the frame more because that restriction isn't there). Exciting times!
3DCOM was going with a service model as well but the internets were pretty new to most people back then. They also got a write up in the Pipeline section of PCMagazine (new technologies section) back when suck things mattered. I think I saved a copy of that too. Time to go digging through the ancient technology box!
EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I think it's neat this service finally exists!