The following is from a letter written to me by Steve Clay:
In 1993 Telegrafix created RIPscrip (Remote Imaging Protocol) and it
became THE BBS graphics standard after color ANSI. Looking back on it,
RIP seems to have been an early precursor to SVG. Simple ASCII files
that were interpreted to form colorful scalable graphics and multiple
fonts on a 640x350 EGA display. SySops used RIP files to create
advanced GUI's for their systems. Our local paper, the Gainesville Sun,
had a beautiful RIP BBS called SunOne BSS but it's long gone.
Examples of RIP art:
http://www.outworldarts.com/rip.html
A poor quality screen grab of Telegrafix's Searchlight BBS main menu
with RIP graphics:
http://www.telegrafix.com/products/searchlight/menu1.gif
"Searchlight is the first BBS product with built-in support for RIP, the
new non-proprietary terminal protocol that brings graphics, mouse
support, and other GUI features to BBSing for the first time.
Searchlight detects calls from RIP graphics terminals and provides
features like mouse support, dialog boxes and scroll bars automatically.
In addition, you can customize your display screens, menus, messages and
other parts of your system with RIP graphics using a RIP graphics screen
generator."
The RipTerm program (for accessing BBS)
http://www.telegrafix.com/products/ripterm/index.htm (last update in
'97)
RipView (evidentally they did their best to embed RIP graphics/scripting
into web pages)
http://www.telegrafix.com/products/ripview/overview.htm
Later Telegrafix developed a webserver "Spinnaker" that could create
RIPs on-the-fly from several databases and they also developed an
advanced RIP format RIP2. The RIP2 specification was due to be released
in 1996.