It was originally created by Jeff Reeder, Jim Bergman, and Mark Hayton of TeleGrafix Communications in Huntington Beach, California to enhance bulletin board systems and other applications.
RIPscrip was introduced in 1992 and consisted of ASCII-text descriptions of vector-drawn graphics and images, along with facilities to create menus and clickable buttons.
These were sent from the BBS instead of the more common ANSI color-coded text-mode screens, and were interpreted on the user's end by a RIP-enabled terminal program such as TeleGrafix's own RIPTerm.
Later versions provided resolution independence (after a fashion), expanded color palettes, and the ability to work over telnet for Internet access.
[citation needed] By this time public access to the World Wide Web caused interest in bulletin board systems to rapidly decline, resulting in the eventual end of RIPscrip development and the company.
Vector image standards which are present on the World Wide Web today that draw some similarities include Adobe Flash and SVG.
Graphics output is described in a series of text instructions, which have been heavily optimized in RIPscrip to be as short as possible in order to save transmission time.