Re:The Sad Story Of The Unicode Snowman
by tptacek on Thursday December 23, 2010 @09:29PM
(#2036421)
I remember RIPscrip not getting much love on the BBS scene while ANSI got more and more elaborate; like a very juvenile microcosm of the war between bitmap and vector graphics.
It might be because while RIP graphics were technically superior, they were just another lo fi graphics medium. PCs had better graphics in games etc, while ANSI art has an enduring oldschool quality about it. Also it degrades gracefully to monochrome ASCII. :-)
Re:The Sad Story Of The Unicode Snowman
by tptacek on Thursday December 23, 2010 @10:42PM
(#2036506)
High-end ANSI art did not degrade well, for what it's worth. Beyond that, towards the end of the trend, BBS banners were really only legible in TheDraw's high-res mode.
Re:The Sad Story Of The Unicode Snowman
by gregpilling on Friday December 24, 2010 @12:11AM
(#2036611)
if you are a youngin' at 2400 baud, what does that make me with my parallel port 14,400 that was bigger than the laptop that I am typing this on?
Re:The Sad Story Of The Unicode Snowman
by timcederman on Friday December 24, 2010 @04:08AM
(#2036932)
RIP was quite widespread in NZ for some reason.
My first modem was 2400 baud so I'm a youngin' by some standards, but wow, seeing incremental graphic drawing was pretty cool back in the pre-AOL days. It was neater than progressive-jpeg because you'd watch the vector image get constructed on the fly: first the background outline, then a floodfill, then some more shapes, a few more flood fills, some detail lines, etc.
Before that I do remember using a modem in 3rd grade (circa 1988) and reading ascii-art emails from my principal. It was a green monochrome display so it was probably either ASCIIExpress or ProTerm, but I'm just guessing based on context.