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.
Yeah, it was just way too late. If it had come out in like '87, and widely deployed by '89, there was a window of 4-5 years that could have worked well; by '93-'94 the action was in running SLIP/PPP on your netcom account to get direct access to the Internet, not dialing up to a BBS.
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...
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.
Yeah, it's kind of amazing. In 1994 I mostly used BBSs, and through an education grant had an entire 30 minutes per day I could use to dial-in to a very spare text-only Internet terminal with gopher access only.
By 1996 I was helping a startup ISP get off the ground and sending out floppy disks with dial-up internet, email software and a web browser and had pretty much just stopped using BBSs.
It also required its own proprietary dialup client on the user PC end, which meant switching out of whatever dialup BBS-oriented ANSI software you were using that had your list of local BBSes in it. Such as commo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22957345
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.