Skypix

Skypix was probably the world's first modern, fully interactive online graphics-and-sound protocol. Released as part of the Atredes BBS system (later renamed Skyline) in 1987, Skypix for the first time allowed BBS sysops to run systems with rich graphics, changeable fonts, mouse-controlled actions, animations and sound. It predated Mosaic - and thus the World Wide Web itself - by several years, though it had most of the same capabilities.

Technically a proprietary extension of ANSI codes, Skypix had a rich command set and featured the first "authoring program", Skypaint, which could generate Skypix files directly from a familiar-looking paint program. All a sysop had to do was insert these files in his system, and suddenly people with Skypix-enabled terminal programs were presented with a rich, completely interactive graphics interface, as opposed to the ANSI graphics that were the state of the art until then.

Skypix might have remained a curiosity if creator Michael Cox hadn't thought to include a programming interface. Sysops who were conversant with the ARexx language (a variant of REXX for the Amiga) could write games and other programs using Skypix graphics and include them anywhere in their systems. This resulted in an enthusiastic group of Skypix hobbyists and many firsts, from the world's first fully-graphical online chess games to the first online graphic adventure games, to the first online paint and photo galleries. These were widely traded and the average Skyline sysop had many of them on their systems.

Skypix was available only on the Amiga computer, which at that time was the only computer with sufficient graphics capabilities to make the project a reality. At one time over a thousand Skyline systems were operating the world over, thanks to the Amiga's international popularity. Amiga inventor Jay Miner himself ran a Skyline system for a time.