RIPscrip - the online graphics format that predates the modern Web
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- Опубліковано 30 тра 2024
- Before home Internet was commonplace, there emerged a competing technology for displaying color graphics and text called the Remote Imaging Protocol (RIP). A look at the history of RIPscrip and how it worked.
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Peter (Melair)
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Jim Leonard
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00:00 Introduction
00:58 Background & History
03:22 Features
09:44 Implementation
13:30 Games, Music & Art
16:44 RIPscrip 2.0
18:10 End of the BBS Era
20:26 Conclusion
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That moment where you realize that even though you grew up in this era and thought you were pretty well versed in various things at the time, somehow I completely missed RIP.
Today is the first time I've heard of this, thank you for the wonderful documentary!
Same here. I’ve been using personal computers since 1981 (Atari 8-bit) and quickly got online with a 300 baud modem. By 1989 I had a 386 PC, vga graphics and a fast modem for the time and still going online. I never came across RIP. Could it be that if you were an early Internet adopter you missed the later BBS scene?
I think I found 1 bulletin board back in the day that supported RIPScript... or maybe just one door game. As popular as it may have been, few of the BBSs that I frequented used it.
Yes, I never heard of it. It looked pretty funky.
Most people didn't use bbs it was very expensive.
@@belstar1128 A local phone call was expensive?
Back in the day I had my own BBS with RA under OS/2 and was the sysop of it, of course proud. As I had discovered RIP for the graphics I found that at first and second glance really ingenious. But still the good old valued ANSI graphics was somehow more suitable. Anyway, that was my experience at the time. And nice to see this.
I was one of those ANSI artists back in the day! I remember the ANSI creating programs to be very cumbersome and time consuming to use effectively. It was a big deal when you could finally use the arrow keys to move the cursor freely through the document vs creating them like a weaver operating a loom😂
Nice! I remember using TheDraw software for my ANSI menus and such which must have come later since it had a nice screen editor like you describe. I don't have a single artistic bone in my body so it was all just geometric shapes and symmetry for me though :P
Thank you for this walk down memory lane. I was heavy into the BBS scene from 85 to 96. RIP graphics were a joy to watch as the picture unfolded in front of you (as you said) as the original artist had drawn it. Thank you also for using the terms baud and bps correctly and also adding in a “lamer” and “sysop” in there too. You obviously lived in this era and are clearly no “newbie” with an intention to “flame”.
I remember RIP being a thing, but in my area very few BBSs bothered with RIP and we had a healthy BBS community well into the mid/late-90s
I guess it may have been a regional thing. Of the roughly two dozen local boards in my area code, maybe half of them supported RIP.
This took me back, I grew up in the golden era of BBSing and RIP graphics, very cool video!
I remember RIP on my Commodore Amiga 500 in the 1990s. At the time not very many BBS supported RIP so it had very limited exposure. I later moved to OS/2 Warp to get connected to the internet. Later Windows and now I'm on Linux as my daily driver.
Cool, I will have to look for an Amiga client to try out on one of the remaining telnet RIP boards! Our local area had a lot of RIP-enabled BBSes but I wonder if we were an exception being relatively isolated in our own little microcosm up in Maine.
The whole NAPLPS system you mentioned that Prodigy used was based on a technology called "Telidon" that was heavily used by Cable companies in Canada back in the 80s I recall. There used to be TV channels where information, graphic stories, and other information was broadcast using these Telidon graphics which looked and worked similar to the principle of RIP. Like you, I used to get mesmerised by the way the graphics would just draw in one vector/polygon/flood fill at a time. There was a children's storybook programme that used to air called "Genesis Storytime" where it was just a broadcast of these Telidon graphics depicting children's stories that you read out with text and pictures. Fond memories.
That's cool, I read that NAPLPS was used for television graphics among other things, but didn't chase the history back to Telidon. Neat they were doing that sort of stuff already in the 70's and early 80's. Thanks for sharing!
@@retrobitstv yes back in the 80s when there weren't that many extra TV channels, the cable companies used to fill out the extra channels with these so-called "Telidon channels". Basically they could receive these low-bandwidth audio/video information services over a phone line, process them on their telidon terminals, then broadcast out the graphics on a regular TV channel. An example was the "Highway Road Conditions" channel that told you the weather conditions on the roads in my area. Found a UA-cam look of exactly what this used to look like on Telidon, I recall this exact channel here in Winnipeg. Even back then, I was mesmorized by the way the graphics came in and used to have these Telidon channels playing in the background when not watching anything else. ua-cam.com/video/0LbvcDnsYDI/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/0LbvcDnsYDI/v-deo.html
quick 10 min documentary about Telidon history: ua-cam.com/video/vjMUe7hkwRs/v-deo.html
Fascinating! I completely missed this and I did begin on BBS systems at about 1993 I think. In 1995 I had my first Internet connection and RIP was nowhere to be seen.
That’s the first time in 30 years I heard the term lamers lol. I remember dialing up RIP bbs on my amiga 500, great episode, thanks for the memories
@8:41 - Lamers... whoa, that term takes me back.
I joined the BBS era late, somewhere in '94, near its very end. I even had my short-lived nighttime-only BBS running on Remote Access, which functioned for around a year or so. Had much fun configuring it and doing the ANSI screens, and I've spent large part of the summer making that BBS into reality. I have heard of RIPscrip but none of the local BBS-es supported it. To me, back then, sounded like the technology was stillborn and not being widely spread. This literally opened my eyes that it was way more used than I knew of, especially the scene art. I always thought of it as a bunch of bland screens with pre-windows era rudimentary GUI, but this scene art makes the whole thing way more interesting that it was back then to me.
Thanks for today's flashback moment. Ah yes RIP. Many hours hand coding.
I'd completely forgotten about it until this video.
My how fast things progressed in the 90s.
I had totally forgotten about RIP graphics. Thanks for a great video reminding me!
what a wild nostalgia trip this was. Thank you!
Thanks for the video, it's the first one I found that goes through RIPscript. THANK YOU!
There in the late 90's I had a BBS running the Wildcat BBS software on Windows 95 or 98 that every day at 23:59 was shut down with scripts and various programs to later be restarted to make Windows feel good. Had also fixed a then "old" FlyCAM that was connected via the LPT port and that image was delivered in real time via RIPscrit to the visitors of the BBS. Also ran the RIPwebb plugin in a browser which was super cool. Now I am looking for software to display RIPscript on Windows10 via RS232 line.
Also used the FirstClass client to reach the IDG server in the 90s.
Wow, I remember writing the RIPscrip engine for QmodemPro all those many years ago. Thanks!!
Very cool! I don't remember ever having used QmodemPro, I think I used ProComm Plus but my memory is hazy now. Thanks for stopping by!
Great vid! Unfortunately I never had BBS’es around me that used RIP.
I remember RIP. I also recall a similar graphical BBS system that was Windows 3.1 based, but I can’t recall what it was called.
I recall seeing a demo video for the Prodigy service; it (the demo AND the service) was included with the computer we got from Packard-Bell in 1994.
this is excellent! I created a series of ripscript products just because the format was basically a 1:1 translation of borlands BGI format.
This may have been key to the early adoption by 3rd party developers. This nay also be the formats downfall because when you look at it Telegrafix really didn't do much innovation . It was basically BGI+base 36 encoding + user input
I released all my products eventually as freeware. Should be able to find most of them out there, For anyone interested look for JView/Jdraw/Jmedia. And I nailed the Bezier curve - it was completely accurate to the telegrafix version.
Presumably you just followed De Casteljau subdivision to render your Bézier curves.
i had some books and access to local bbs. I just started leaning about graphics and I didn't know about standard algorithms. the source was either some pseudo algorithm I found and converted to Turbo Pascal or it could have been some C code. I'm not sure. but my faulty code ended up in SWAG (pascal source archival group) which i think may have ended up being used in other RIP related projects. I posted the code to get some assistance but i don't remember getting a reply. Years later while searching for some other code I stumbled across my own code. So I could be the source of many incompatible bezier curve implementations.
@@retronicksprogrammingchann2337 Aw, I remember many years ago trying to implement bezier curves using some source from SWAG. I couldn't get it to do anything I wanted, so thanks for that! :%P
Oh my, the word TCP IP Stack rang a bell.
I truly didn't remember how hard it was back then to get those non *nix machines we had at home on the Internet. Amiga, Ms DOS, windows 3, MacOs 7.5.3.. They just weren't meant for networking. And we had no clue what we were doing.
None of my local BBS's ever had RIP, that would have blown me away.
Smilar to SkyPix on the Amiga from 1987. I remember that any line noise would make those neat pictures look like garbage.
I remember using the competing protocol in Amigaland, Skypix. Would be cool to have a video about it too.
I am not familiar with that one but of course I didn't have an Amiga back in those days either.
Great stuff! My local area never got on the RIP train so I don't recall experiencing it before the web took over.
Helped run a BBS that played around with Rip, back in the day.
Also, don 't forget NAPLPS. Plenty of pre WWW graphic implementations from kiosks to Prodigy.
I read a bit about NAPLPS. But the one I had experience with was DEC’s ReGIS graphics. Also text-based, with a slightly more sophisticated command set.
NIPPLES?
RIP was stillborn. If only it had shown up in the early 1980s.
But in the early 80s there where too many systems with their own unique way of doing graphics. like a c64 image just wouldn't work on a zx spectrum. they are too different.
Great video, not having been in to BBS back then, I'd never heard of this before. As with most things in life, I guess there are far more failures than successes, even if the premise is sound. But it does show how slow and bloated the modern web is, when even simple pages would take forever on even the fastest dial-up modems.
Wow, this tech is really cool. It will be fun to discover what's available for Commodore machines that can handle RIPscrip. I think I vaguely heard about it back in the day, but no BBS I ever called (to my fading knowledge) ever used it.
I had never heard of rip before, very different video, thankyou!
I'd say that RIP did in fact reach it's full potential -- it just didn't have all that much potential to begin with. Reeder and co were obviously struggling desperately to find any sort of positive spin when in fact they were already several years too late with their tech, and there was no way they were going to compete with the hundreds of scientists working on the same ideas at Adobe and the JPEG working groups, etc. At best, RIP was a stop-gap technology, designed to solve a few minor problems that were already being addressed by improving hardware, and that were bound to go away on their own. But, it was pretty damn amazing in that brief period before it became obvious that HTML was The Future. Nice, nostalgic look back at it, I enjoyed this little blast from the past.
7:43 Ah, good old “Compliment mode”. Always preferable to “Insult mode” ...
I came here for an insult...
Oh! This is abuse!
Side note I love that Tandy 1000 HX. Had one growing up.
Thanks! I enjoy your BBS deep dives.
I'm glad you enjoyed the episode and thank you so much for your support!
Nice early online stuff is often overlooked or not even archived
I wrote two menu systems for RIP for C-Net Amiga. Very Basic stuff. Still prefered ansi. Guess as a Sysop back then I tried to provide as many ways for the users to login to the BBS as possible.
I tried it. Decided against it. Even on 28k8 I found it pretty slow. It looked very cool though!
Nice video!
I barely remember RIPTerm. Not that many BBS that I used had RIPTerm. Didn't know it was a thing.
SGML, which HTML was loosely based on, was standardized in 1986, but in its turn was based on GML, which was developed by IBM in the 1960s. HTML wasn't a graphics format, and wasn't primarily even intended to be one, and still isn't one. It's a hyperlinked text format coupled with HTTP, which replaced the obscure and semi-closed Gopher system.
What HTML represents, at its inception, was a serialized format of NeXTSTEP user interface objects, which enabled forms as an interactive element, which was a new thing that the read-only browsing of Gopher didn't have.
HyperCard and its event-based scripting model is a precursor to the branch of the Web that led to our graphically rich, interactive, event-based client-side scripting of the modern web.
Might want to look at the roboFX bbs system
What was with the image of the red dragon in the thumbnail for this video? Is it the dragon from "Medieval Meyham" (Homebrew version of the game "Warlords"; both made for the Atari 2600)?
It was RIP fan art made to advertise the popular BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon.
Watching this, I remember some old C64 games that drew up their graphics in a similar way, I wonder if they used this? The Hobbit on PC seems to use this technique?
I think it's probably fair to say that most early games that used vector graphics like golf simulators, for example, tended to draw up the graphics one vector at a time like this. No point in pre-rendering a frame or double-buffering when it takes 5-10 seconds to redraw the screen. At least it gave us something to look at while the CPU chugged away!
All the earliest graphical adventure games, on the Apple II, used this technique, because of memory and speed limitations. The graphics drew in roughly as fast as a slow modem connection with RIP. Some early C64 games used it, and even a few early PC games in CGA.
Also a late stage commercial campaign starring spokesmen Rip Taylor & Rip Torn couldn't stave off the World Wide Web.😄
I totally forgot about RIP. Thanks for the video.
It is just a reminder of how hopeless inadequate the web browser is for what is now used for. CSS, javascript DOM manipulations, it's ridiculous. The likes of office 365 are tremendous feats of engineering but when used in anger they reveal just how bad they are compared to the desktop variants. Still keeps millions of devs in jobs.
9:01 “Wintermute”?
Ha, I never noticed that before! Looks kind of like a circuit board texture? Must be a nod to Neuromancer. Cool!
I remember this. It totally wasn't needed. All it did was put graphical boxes around the same text you got using ANSI, but it was much slower. Some people just hate text and love pretty pictures (looking at you, Mac users).
RIP is resting in peace.
The way lines are drawn in real time reminds me if old-school SCI games.
First things I have been thinking of is the Hulk adventure game on ZX Spectrum. And Oekaki BBS, an internet bulletin board which allowed you to record brush strokes and post an animation of painting process.
New Sub! Dryden, MI
Cool Video, I've Never heard of this, thought it always went BBC/MUTINY!/AOL lol
Thanks and welcome aboard!
RIP never took off in my area. I knew it existed, but no BBS I ever called actually supported it.
That's a bummer. It was well supported in my particular area but it seems like that could have been an anomaly.
@@retrobitstv How did the saying go? "The future is here. It's just not evenly distributed yet." In my area, we seem to have made the move to the Internet on the early end. So probably RIPscrip just was never needed.
Where did you find those shelves? My 8bit office is getting out of hand lol.
They're from Amazon but the price has gone up a lot since I bought them. If I were to do it again, I'd get something a bit deeper as well. The nice thing is they can support a lot of weight (200lbs per shelf, it claims in the manual) amzn.to/43oPial
A slight hold off by only a couple of years for the adoption of the web, and things may have turned out entirely different.
I remember a couple of BBS that had this tech in the late 80s. It was very cool to experience. EDIT: Oh 1992... huh, I must have misremembered. I can always remember a lot that happened, but not always exactly when in time it did 😂
It's 'Xwindow', not "Xwindows' ;-)
I will note, the ANSI BBSes tended to be much more active... I have a feeling the RIPscrip ones were excited to use fancy technology, but didn't have a lot under the hood. That's just the ones I connected to though, I'm sure there were some very popular ones using RIP... just never ran into those.
Hahaaaaaaa lamer.
Heh that RPG looks awesome.
LoRD was super popular back in the day. Along with Barren Realms Elite, Trade Wars 2002... so many great door games!
3:42 - "The RIPscrip creation tools were not (provided for free)"
Ah yes, so many hours I spent working around that by writing up RIP instructions manually into a text file, calculating base-36 numeric values by hand, etc... I was cheap.
I don't remember doing it in a text editor so I must have pirated RIPaint or used a 3rd party tool. Memory is hazy at this point!
@@retrobitstv As I recall the issue was basically that the free (shareware) version of the tool would let me load files and display them but not save them to disk. So I could try things out in the editor, but to actually commit them to a file I'd need to script up the commands by hand and then load them back into the editor to see if it worked.
I don't think I did *that* much stuff with RIP, but as you say memory is hazy.
The Canton Connection BBS (my 16 line system) proudly supported RIP using MajorBBS and later Worldgroup from Galacticom. I still have my original system and software disks.
Wow, 16 lines! The "big" boards in my area code only had 2 nodes. We had a few MajorBBSes but it was a pretty small market.
Great episode!
I ran The Heart of Gold BBS (FidoNet node: 1:255/42) using DLG Pro (aka. Dialog Pro) on my Amiga 3000T. I dabbled with RIP a bit, creating a few screens, but since none of my regular users used RIP, I didn't go any further. I do remember DLG Pro allowed the user to enable RIP if they wanted it.
I didn't remember how arcane the commands are. It gives Brainfuck a run for its money.
It would have been cool if it had become a web standard back in the 90's. It would have been a step up from slow loading bitmap graphics. Flash beat it out but now we have canvas instead. It seems it shouldn't be too difficult to create a RIP interpreter in JavaScript and load RIP files into a web page.
Very cool. We only had one Amiga board in our local area code that I can recall. Where was your board? The name sounds so familiar but maybe that's just from reading HHGTTG so many times :P
I don't know if BBS usage was a popular thing for wealthy people to use, but long distance phone costs made using a BBS very expensive. That drawing of a whale at 9600 baud might be costing you 5 to 15 cents per minute in 1990 (or 12 to 36 cents now). And speaking of complexity, FidoNet was a joke. I tried for a long time to email someone using it, eventually had to give up... it was so difficult to understand.
So, you found local BBSes. Most of them had a list of other local numbers.
I had a list of ten or so phone numbers to call every night
what if someone re-made ascii starwars in RIP...
That would be awesome!
Is it possible to use it today.
It is, there are several RIP-enabled telnet BBSes still running. One of them provides a link to download RIPterm with DOSBox already set up with the telnet modem. I put links to both of the boards in the research document linked to in the description!
I'd have spent FAR too much time on that animation tool.
You would have had to because it's awfully clunky!
That white paper is kinda funny, with its "people can't cope with IP addresses and they're running away from the internet!"
Sure, guys.
To be fair, that's a somewhat true depiction of the experience of getting online back in the day. You are probably too young to remember but back in those days, operating systems were single-user with basically no networking capabilities whatsoever unless you were working on some sort of UNIX workstation. There was no TCP/IP stack built into the OS as it is the norm today. So in order to get to the internet, you needed to get a modem (at least one with 14400 bps as anything slower was simply _unbearable_ ) and then contact your ISP & subscribe to their services and then they would send you by mail - YES, standard post office! - a few floppy disks with a few pages of instructions printed on a booklet or printing paper. Those floppies essentially had a TCP/IP stack (typically Trumpet Winsock for Windows users), a web browser (typically Mosaic or the new kid in the block, Netscape) and in some rare cases, a mail client and/or a Gopher client. Those instructions showed how to install the TCP/IP stack, configure a _static_ IP address (as it was common back at the time), netmask, gateway, etc., DNS resolution and what not and THEN install the web browser. It was overwhelming and it certainly was discouraging to some people! Compare that to the simplicity of BBS where you get a modem (a cheaper 2400, 4800 or 9600 bps would be completely fine) just install a terminal emulator, dial to a number and that's it! It wasn't until Bill Gates decided that the Internet was the future and made Windows 95 fully Internet-capable from the get go that most people actually accessed the World Wide Web. Until then, it was mostly the realm of academics and enthusiasts.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 OMG dude, yikes.
It's not a somewhat true depiction. I'm NOT too young to remember, I was there for it all, using SLiRP, on the sly on a dial in UNIX shell account, and this whitepaper 30 years after the fact is the first I've heard of people fleeing from the internet because IP addresses, domain names, name servers and gateway addresses were too confusing to manage. No, back in the days when the internet was the province of enthusiasts and professionals, those minor technicalities were trivial and scared away nobody. Like you say, it wasn't until Bill Gates made it so easy that dead people could do it that people started flocking on to the internet in droves.
That whitepaper was pure cope on the part of the developers of RIP. Thanks for the lenthy mansplain, though.
@@MaggieKeizai Well, I did preface my comment with "to be fair to them" and stating that it was a somewhat accurate description of the experience of getting online in the late 90's for _anyone_ NOT using a UNIX workstation (most likely already set up by a professional) did I not? And my perspective comes from having worked on tech support for not just one but three different ISP during the late 90's and early 00's and me having _personally_ witnessed people giving up because 1) yeah, it was indeed too complicated for them for 2) something of a novelty that they would only use 04 to 06 hours a month as those were the cheapest plans available at the time. Mind you, this was ages before AOL was giving away coasters that made the entire experience nearly a point 'n' click affair. Your experience is every bit as anecdotal as mine but hey, thanks for writing mine's off as _mansplaining_ though! That's surely the way to lead to good conversations on a tech channel.
Even Windows didn't really support Internet until, what, the *second* version of Windows 95? Maybe NT had it earlier...
So before that, getting a web browser running on Windows meant downloading and installing a winsock library, win32s (if on Windows 3.1), and then either Mosaic or early Netscape Navigator... For a while early on it *was* a pretty hairy process.
But yeah obviously the Telegraphix guys were exaggerating that to make their products look more appealing.
It not only looks like GEM or GEOS, it had the same fate. Good ideas, but they lost out to something better.
Ha, RIP...
Adobe didn't create Flash, that was Macromedia.,., it was later bought by Adobe and then killed off recently.
Good point! Funny I totally forgot that Adobe bought them out. I even used Macromedia Director and Shockwave back in the 90's. Whoops!
2400 bps lamers!
I'm pretty sure by the time RIP rolled around we had our boards set up to reject 300 and 1200 bps callers!
Completely missed this back in day, cool stuff! But you see, Amiga came first anyway, again... ;) en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skypix
Nice, I didn't get to experience the Amiga until much later so I wasn't aware of Skypix!