
BBS Graphics History: Pretty awesome, until the web showed up - ColinWright
https://tedium.co/2020/07/21/bbs-graphics-history-ripscrip-naplps/
======
dwater
Interesting the article didn't mention the one thing I remember vividly about
RIP graphics, which is the rendering process. I always assumed it was vector
based because of the way the image would get rendered segment by segment as it
was downloaded. It looked like you were watching a video of the artist
painting the image. Shapes and lines would get created and filled in and
overlayed. On a 2400 modem it was interesting to watch, which was important
when you were waiting for data to trickle in. Here's an example:
[https://youtu.be/XtWmPO-cLR8](https://youtu.be/XtWmPO-cLR8)

~~~
bluedino
Basically the same effect happened with a lot of DOS shareware drawing
programs in the day. The file formats were often instructions like:

    
    
      Line (20,500) (45, 520) (15)
      Line (200,523) (65, 520) (15)
      Circle (300, 300) (100) (30)
      Fill (50,30) (16)
      and so on
    

If you had a slower computer, or the software wasn't optimized that well,
you'd be able to sit and watch your drawing re-draw every time you loaded the
file or made certain edits.

~~~
int_19h
Not just DOS, Windows as well. The WMF (Windows Metafile), EMF (Enhanced
Metafile) and EMF+ formats are exactly that, except that primitives correspond
to GDI or GDI+ calls. And they're still fully supported. Even MSPaint in Win10
can still open them, although it's not listed among supported extensions when
you do File -> Open.

------
ekidd
According to the article, RIPscrip came to market in 1993 and it was being
widely advertised to BBS sysops by 1994. From what I remember of this era,
that was simply too late to stand a chance against the juggernaut of the web.

NCSA Mosaic (the first popular graphical web browser) came out in 1992. By the
time I first got web access in the fall of 1994, the web was already far
larger and more fascinating than any BBS I had ever used. And then Netscape
Navigator 1.0 was released on December 15, 1994, and I remember that all my
geek friends had concluded that the world was about to change. The early web
was _captivating._

In 1994 and 1995, a proprietary graphics format from a 6 person company stood
no chance.

I do miss BBSs. The shared a lot of the good aspects of forum culture in the
mid-2000s, but for a local audience. And they definitely had a true geek
spirit. But the early web brought the world to your fingertips.

~~~
bluedino
Part of the beauty about a BBS was that you could access it using anything,
even an old or spare computer. All you needed was a modem and text display. An
old 286 with a CGA card and 640k RAM was the perfect machine for a BBS, and
with an EGA card you could dial in to the few RIP boards that existed.

Sure, you could do so much more with an HTML/browser, but you needed megabytes
of ram, a high-res graphics card and monitor, a mouse, and OS like Windows or
Mac, a fast CPU...

~~~
giantrobot
While it's certainly true BBS access had lower requirements than graphical web
browsers, by the time graphical browsers appeared there was a huge population
of home systems that could run them.

By 1994 Windows was installed by default on consumer PCs and you'd be hard
pressed to buy a new PC that wasn't multimedia capable. The multimedia trend
had been pushed by CD-ROM content since the start of the decade. Within a year
of Netscape becoming available Windows 95 was the default OS on new PCs. AOL,
CompuServe, and MSN also all existed by 1994 and had graphical clients.

So by the time Netscape was first released a majority of PCs in use were
easily capable of running it. The number of just AOL users likely dwarfed the
number of BBS users even at their peak popularity. C64 and Apple II die hards
might have still been dialing their local BBSes but they weren't a majority
and BBSes weren't really offering the ease of use as online services and then
the web.

~~~
bluedino
True - but by that time BBSes were basically dead anyway.

------
sbarre
You can't talk about ANSI and RIP graphics without covering the art scene that
existed around that..

A lot of it was banners for pirate boards, but the art that those folks
managed to squeeze out of text characters was amazing.

Textfiles.com has a good archive:
[http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/](http://artscene.textfiles.com/ansi/)

Tip: use the (?) next to the source file to view the rendered PNG

~~~
mrslave
And [https://16colo.rs/](https://16colo.rs/)

~~~
christianvozar
The ansi scene is alive today and more vibrant than the past decade. Be sure
to pay a visit to 16c and view some of what ansi wizards put out using just
those same 16 colors. alpha king / blocktronics

------
sjs382
Ah, an opportunity to share my favorite RIPscrip art of all time:
[https://16colo.rs/pack/sadist04/K%21LIGHT.RIP](https://16colo.rs/pack/sadist04/K%21LIGHT.RIP)

One of the magical things about RIPscrip is that some (most?) viewers drew the
art as it loaded in layers, so you got to see the vector art be assembled as
your modem worked. Do yourself a favor and download PabloDraw (linked from the
article) and view that k!light.rip file (it's part of this pack:
[https://files.artpacks.org/1999/sadist04.zip](https://files.artpacks.org/1999/sadist04.zip)).

~~~
sjs382
Also, I just can't miss an opportunity to plug
[https://artpacks.org](https://artpacks.org)

~~~
thesuitonym
Where are these still coming from?

~~~
sjs382
There have been a few packs released this year, even. It's a fairly tight knit
community with most of it on IRC, Discord and Facebook. Check efnet #16c for
one of the more active places.

------
joubert
My friend ran his BBS with Excalibur.

Entirely graphical (you could design pages using drag & drop, use vector
graphics, etc.) and ran on Windows.

The company closed shop in 1999.

Example screenshots: \-
[https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836516_pic1....](https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836516_pic1.png)
\-
[https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836564_pic2....](https://infofiles.org/uploads/posts/2018-08/1534836564_pic2.png)

~~~
kfarr
Awesome reference to Excalibur. I think there are probably a surprising number
of other "long tail" attempts at better BBS graphics.

One I used as a kid was OMNI BBS (sometimes written O-M-N-I BBS) which ran on
windows:
[http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/IBM/WINDOWS/OMNIBBS/](http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/software/IBM/WINDOWS/OMNIBBS/)

Only a few of my friends ever dialed in but it was a next generation
replacement to a custom qbasic bbs that I had written.

The OMNI BBS admin interface seemed to borrow heavily from Visual Basic and
even included Basic scripting features so that you could program entire games
and experiences. Unfortunately it was very buggy and combined with my amateur
coding skills I didn't get very far with anything beyond the basic built-in
features of email, message board and file repository.

------
rmason
I remember being at an early BBSCON, perhaps in Tampa. I bought something at a
vendors booth. He got on a PC and typed in my order. I asked what he was doing
and he explained that he was connected to their BBS in Denver. Once it charged
my credit card it was going to print out a mailing label with a bar code. An
employee would scan the code, find the book, put it into an envelope and slap
on the label.

That book was waiting on my doorstep when I returned from the conference. This
was maybe 1989 or 1990, I told my boss that our brand new FAX machine was
toast, I'd just seen the future. The really funny thing is that thirty years
later that FAX machine (or it's replacement) is still being used.

------
doublerabbit
Just throwing these two links in to the pen.

[http://artcity.bitfellas.org/](http://artcity.bitfellas.org/) \- Amiga
artwork

[http://www.wab.com](http://www.wab.com) \- CSS/Javascript demoscene intro's

------
dleslie
RIPscrip never took off in my area; but I still BBS to this day and it seems
to me that it failed to stick.

Consider the LORD dragon presented in the article in both ANSI and RIP: the
_ability_ chasm between the artistic representations is enormous!

ANSI was lovely because it was only a small abstraction beyond text; and the
chunky lo-fi art made it accessible to many, without getting ugly.

Consider nowadays where the low-ability alternative to that high fidelity
dragon would likely be rendered in shaky mspaint blobs. There's good reason we
don't see much of that, and yet in the days of the BBS there was ANSI
_dripping_ off the text.

------
imchillyb
I ran a Searchlight BBS that used RIPScrip.

At the time, it was beautiful. I'd run a WWIVBBS prior to that, and the users
loved the change.

Fast forward 6 months, and the world.wide.web was just too attractive to keep
using a BBS platform. RIP RIPscrip.

------
UI_at_80x24
I used to run a C64 CNet based BBS (Tomcat BBS's were very popular in my
area). One thing that CNet did that none of the others did was allow you to
buffer ANSI/ASCII keystrokes and then play it all back. This resulted in a
'stop motion' style ANSI art "movies". Some of my users were quite good at
making these movies, incredibly entertaining too.

~~~
egypturnash
s/ANSI/PETSCII :)

------
jandrese
The problem I had with RIPscript was back in the 90s on my Mac there were no
RIPscript viewers available. It was a DOS only technology, while the Web
worked on not only the Mac but also my FreeBSD box. The company was also
trying to make a living off of the tech while Mosaic and Apache were free.

The other aspect was that it was relatively hard to make a RIPscript image.
You needed a vector graphics artist. The web went with simple raster graphics
instead which opened up the talent pool considerably. The bandwidth and memory
constraints that RIPscript were built around were quickly demolished in the
90s as computer power skyrocketed and relatively fast modems became cheap.

~~~
whoopdedo
But then Mac users had FirstClass, TeleFinder, and NovaLink (though I never
used that one).

------
glenneroo
Ah nostalgia! I "volunteered" at TeleGrafix in HB back in the day. I used to
ride my bike an hour after school just to package up RIPterm/paint floppies
and use that horrible FedEx PC in the back. I was a fledgling code junkie and
had hoped I could glean some of the genius that went into making RIPscrip,
though I'm sure it would have gone over my head anyways. I was definitely a
bit sad they never "made it big", on the other hand, they never paid me for
all those hours I put in (and I never even got to look at any code).

~~~
Marc_Bryan
Yep. Nostalgic times! Memory flyby to a bygone era!

Wish could time travel and live that life again!

Not a fan of the current developments though! Sadly!

------
weld
In 1986 I was a developer for IBM's IBM PC support BBS. You could access
knowledge base articles and patches. At that time we wanted to add graphics
and were looking at adding NAPLPS support.

------
rbanffy
It's interesting to note that the only terminal I use that rendered the VT-100
torture test perfectly is Apple's Terminal. All others balked at double
height/width.

Few implement a full set of ANSI SGR commands. VTE and Konsole are the only
ones I found that can do overlines (useful in status lines).

Also odd that so many people reinvented wheels - when sixels, Tektronix,
Minitel, NAPLPS and others were available, people still invented new
"standards", to the point standards became mostly useless.

------
carl8
Back in 1995 I wrote a library for creating BBS Door games using RIP graphics,
in QuickBasic 4.5. Also created a RIP Door Game of the classic Battleship
game. It never went anywhere as most of my local BBSs started shutting down
the following year.

I wrote some JavaScript that draws RIP files into a web canvas, and an
experimental RIP to SVG converter. It's still incomplete. Here's the source:
[https://github.com/cgorringe/RIPtermJS](https://github.com/cgorringe/RIPtermJS)

Here's a Demo page where you can see some RIP files rendered in a canvas and
as SVG:
[https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/](https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/)

Specs for v1.54, v2, and v3 can be downloaded here:
[https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/docs...](https://carl.gorringe.org/pub/code/javascript/RIPtermJS/docs/)

Some issues with the RIP format:

1\. RIPscrip v1.54, the most popular version, was targeted towards 640x350 px
EGA graphics, which is an odd resolution with non-square pixels. They tried
fixing this in later versions, but they weren't as popular.

2\. Non-standard bezier curves and the flood fill algorithm caused issues with
rendering. I've had a lot of issues trying to get it working right as the
flood fill would leak through holes in lines which aren't rendered exactly
like RIPterm did. And the specs don't give details on how they did it.

~~~
burps
hey, this is pretty cool! i've actually been looking for something like this
as there is quite a collection of RIPscip files in the archive:
[https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ripscrip](https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ripscrip)

while they convert to PNG just fine, the realtime rendering was at least half
of the experience, especially with the ones that used 'dithering' :) there was
a similar issue for viewing ansimation, this was addressed by using the
javascript version of ansilove
([https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ansimation](https://16colo.rs/tags/content/ansimation))

i'd surely be interested in integrating this in case you find the time to
resolve the last issues.

------
bane
Even before reading the article I was going to mention RIP and how it came
along _just_ as the web was spinning up. Even if the web never became a
consumer-level technology, it was clear that modem speeds were starting to
ramp up around this time and BBS systems were starting to take serious looks
at moving beyond ANSI and ANSI-like text-mode systems.

RIP was notable because of how much it looked like more serious commercial
dial-up systems like the Prodigy On-line service (pre-internet) [1]

One of the ones I remember the best was the FirstClass BBS system for Macs. I
think a modern version is still around for school systems. It offered a full
GUI, I believe it could transfer multiple things at once, and had pretty good
graphics support. There's pitiful little information I can find on the
internet for what it used to look like in the mid-90s, but here's one of the
best screenshots I can find. [2]

IIR there were maybe 2 or 3 other similar systems, each with their own server-
client system and protocol -- these all seem to be lost to time.

The main problem of course is that user-uptake needs to be massive to really
make these a success. With ANSI systems, pretty much any dial-up client could
connect to any BBS systems regardless of what server software it was running.
Even in the case where a weird character set was being sent back (like say
when a MS-DOS system connected to an Amiga) you could more or less still use
the BBS. But for RIP BBSs (and others like FirstClass), you needed a
specialized client to dial-up just the one or two BBSs in your area that
provided it, and if you were an avid BBSer, it really took you out of your
normal "flow" from your main BBS terminal software. Once you were connected,
the content of a RIP BBS may not have been all that compelling as BBSs were
_really_ driven by the interests and passions of the Sysop.

For those that don't remember those days, the average BBS user's workflow
looked something like this:

1 - Fire up your dial-up software

2 - Start dialing every single BBS you've been able to dig up and add to your
dialer phonebook, this is automatic, but you'll get mostly busy signals since
most BBSs are run off of one line.

3 - Eventually connect to one, maybe 20-30 minutes later. Is it one you're
really interested in?

4 - Do some things, you only get a few minutes each day.

5 - Disconnect, start dialing again.

Having to jump out of this fairly automated flow to fire up another different
client just to dial in to one or two boards was just never going to fly.
However, around the time the Web started to really take off some terminal
clients were starting to integrate RIP and most RIP servers had an ANSI
fallback.

One of the reasons I think the web really took off was that you only needed to
connect to your provider, and then _all_ the sites were accessible. You didn't
need to jump around between different applications or clients or anything.
Just connect once, and you can go everywhere even if the content at that time
was more or less the same and graphics and display capability weren't really
much beyond what was theoretically already available.

1 - [https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=prodigy%20on-
line%2...](https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=prodigy%20on-
line%20service%20-site%3Apinterest.*&tbs=imgo%3A1&oq=prodigy%20on-
line%20service%20-site%3Apinterest.*)

2 -
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/57572221@N00/88477451](https://www.flickr.com/photos/57572221@N00/88477451)

------
jkoudys
The best way I remember enhancing the graphics of my door games, was with
those local versions of the game you could install that'd connect using its
own protocol to the BBS. Versions of The Pit where you'd get local images and
sound files. In a lot of ways that feels closer in step to the web, which
focused more on protocols and structure of your data than on how to render
your image. RIPscrip maybe intersects with the <form> element.

Flash seems like the more direct competitor that he touches on. It's easier to
see in hindsight, but they really won by taking care of the content creators.
I tried a few times to make RIP graphics back in the day but could never
really figure it out. Flash, in contrast, had an experience for the designers
and artists that is still remembered fondly today. It set the course for a
whole new generation of animation.

~~~
gscott
BBS Door Games, I ran a few on my bbs. Unfortunately by 1996 I was getting
only a couple of people dialing in any more. Everyone glued to the world wide
web even though the world wide web didn't have as many features at that time.

[https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs-
door-g...](https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-forgotten-world-of-bbs-door-games)

------
mc_woods
You know, I've been doing a lot of linux / ssh work recently, and I'd love to
have something in the console that could give me more of a graphical
interface. The midnight commander is good, but a file manager, document
preview tool would be awesome. Particularly since so much of the content we
produce today is graphical in some way. Something that we could use over SSH
without setting up RDP / VNC - I don't need an entire desktop, and often don't
have the bandwidth to make it viable anyway. Do you think that something like
RIPScript could be used for that? Would there be a way to create a linux
graphical terminal?

~~~
Asooka
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixel) for
displaying static images or
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReGIS) for
vector graphics. Sadly I think only xterm fully supports these. Though the
modern alternative would be an escape sequence to request a file descriptor
into which to just dump an html document. Your OS already has a browser, the
terminal should be able to just embed it above the commandline to display
graphics.

------
darcyparker
Robo/FX was another graphical BBS that came out in the early 90s. I remember
migrating from RemoteAccess to Robo/FX; it was quite the change from ansi art.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/5eo8pz/roboboard_and_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/5eo8pz/roboboard_and_roboboardfx/)

------
yawn
Wow, seeing the LoRD screen was a punch in the feels! It reminds me of a guy
on our bbs who would set his alarm to coincide with the daily Trade Wars reset
so he could get his turns in before anyone else.

~~~
elsonrodriguez
Many a player was killed over Violet and Seth the Bard.

------
bfuclusion
I am eternally ashamed to admit I never did manage to beat the Red Dragon.
Many years later I downloaded the game and ran a local BBS just so I could see
what the result was.

------
zorked
Am I misremembering that RIP also added a very boring download step? Like if
you play LORD for the first time you have to download a bunch of images that
get cached locally. Then the sysop updates to a minor version and you have to
download some of the new art.

I thought it was all too slow (both downloading and drawing menus) and the RIP
art I saw was mostly very underwhelming, in particular compared to ANSI art.

~~~
johann8384
No, that's how it was.

------
js2
I have a very distinct memory of a graphical BBS that ran on the Apple II in
the late 80s. It's possible it only ran on the IIGS, but I don't think so. I
think it used hires mode. My memory is that it was called gbbs, for graphical
bbs.

There was something called Greg's BBS, but that's not what I'm referring to.

If such a thing ever existed, I can find no trace of it on the Internet. :-(

------
hvs
What a blast from the past. I had completely forgot about RIPscrip after I got
internet access in 1994, but I remember how awesome it was after years of
text-based BBS's.

Some example RIP files:
[http://www.kwasstuff.altervista.org/RIP/](http://www.kwasstuff.altervista.org/RIP/)

------
WaitWaitWha
I watched (literally in Cleveland) getting RIP into Searchlight with LaRosa
and Rossiter. TeleGrafix had near-zero footprint in the BBS world. There was
no other BBS that used RIP until Searchlight, yet the article does not mention
this.

How come BBS + RIP article not mention Searchlight?

------
sixothree
I ran a Maximus board connected to FidoNet for a few years. I lost the ansi
menus. They were purposefully more simple than what was around, but I thought
they were elegant and pretty. Upgrading to rip killed the board for me. I shut
it down within a month of that.

------
Bud
Personally, I much preferred (and would still prefer) nice ANSI color all-text
BBSes to this AOLish crud.

Plus, you could access those using a vt100 terminal...which I often did.

------
zzo38computer
I have seen RIPscrip used on the internet, although I had no software to
render it so I just got the text based display instead, which nevertheless is
fine.

------
fouc
It's kind of amazing to think that if we hadn't gone the HTML route, we
might've gone the RIP route..

~~~
christianvozar
One thing to note in why RIP could have never been successful, aside from
originally being closed-source, is while it was vector-based in nature the
specification called for a static sized view port of 320x200. Future revisions
of the spec could have fixed this but it would have missed the window to be
relevant going from BBS to WWW.

------
INTPenis
Pretty until the web showed up, says the website with 25 different domains
linking Javascript alone.

