okay, one final reply

> NAPLPS defined the entirety of the user interface to one of the major pre-internet online services starting in the 1980s (Prodigy), and itself predates GIF by nearly a decade. RIPscrip achieved near universal adoption in the BBS world for a few years prior to the internet taking off. These solutions were the only effective way to create full-screen graphical environments for bandwith-constrained remote applications at the time.

it's not correct to describe prodigy as a 'pre-internet online service'. when prodigy launched in 01984 and got its first user, the internet had been operating for about 7 years and consisted of about 1000 hosts with somewhere on the order of a hundred thousand users. i don't think prodigy ever, at any point, had more users than the internet; it was under half a million users in 01990 (when the internet reached three hundred thousand hosts, most with many users), and i think it was under a million users even at its peak, when its scumbag employees were claiming prodigy had invented the internet and deleting any user messages that criticized a prodigy advertiser or mentioned another user by name

it's also not correct to say that naplps predated gif by nearly a decade. naplps was defined in 01983, gif in 01987. four years is not 'nearly a decade'

finally, although i'm less certain about this part, i don't think it's correct to say that 'ripscrip achieved near universal adoption in the bbs world', ever. ripscrip didn't even exist until 01992, at which point lots of us even in the usa were still running bbses on things like a commodore 64 (which was still being sold until 01994) or a 286. i used a dozen or so bbses in albuquerque at that time, and none of them supported ripscrip that i can recall at all. my non-biological sister met her boyfriend and later husband on one of the big commercial bbses in town, a chat-oriented thing. ansi art was a huge deal, but ripscrip was very little used. and then the internet went mainstream in the usa in 01994 due to the lifting of the nsfnet aup and the launch of netscape; even windows supported it late in the next year, at which point netscape had already gone public. see https://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline/

try searching online for archives of ripscrip art and ansi art. the amount of ansi art even just from 01995 is orders of magnitude bigger than all the rip art that has ever existed

> GIF was first developed in 1987, and was initially used primarily for file uploads of images that were inherently raster (e.g. scanned photos, complex artwork, etc.) or for small icons to be uploaded once and cached locally for use in graphical interfaces. And GIF was only viable for these uses because of its compression.

this also contains some significant mistakes

as i recall it, gif was initially used primarily for line art, which could indeed be quite complex. myself, i mostly used it for line art and fractals. scanned photos were fairly limited because in 01987 ram was expensive, so most people's framebuffers were pretty small; a cga in graphics mode could only display 4 colors at once, an ega (or cga in text mode) only 16, and a macintosh or hercules or sun bwtwo only 2. you really want at least 256 colors for decent scanned photos, and that's the maximum that gif supported or supports even today. people who were scanning photos up to about 01990 were mostly using high-end graphical workstations and not using gif

gif's compression also doesn't help very much with scanned photos, and it doesn't help at all with 256-color scanned photos. even png is less bad here because, even though the paeth predictor was designed for low-color-depth images, the paeth predictor residuals for color gradients are much lower entropy than the raw pixel data

icons for use in graphical interfaces were generally not stored as gifs, but as uncompressed raster data (.xbm, .ico, macintosh images in the resource fork) and generally were not uploaded and cached locally but rather part of the software that used them. most icons were 16×16, and a 16×16 uncompressed icon in two colors is only 32 bytes, which is smaller than literally any image in gif format

i hope this thread has been informative