Talk:Skypix

This article, origially written by Sunnshol who appears to have left the project, includes a number of bold claims about being the "first" this-or-that. But anyone with a passing familiarity with the online world would know that most of these, if not all of them, are untrue.

Almost all of the "firsts" described here are predated by examples on the PLATO system. For instance, a fully GUI based chess program was running on those systems since the early 1970s. By the early 1980s, many of these had been duplicated on the Telidon system as well, a system designed specifically for modem-based graphical communications. Chess is one example that was widely shown on TV. Simpler examples using (primarily) character graphics were already being used in the BBS world based on Viewdata and similar European standards.

I'm not sure how to proceed. I certainly don't think this is subject to AfD, but certainly the claims here need to be removed or reffed. I'll leave this open for a bit before beginning the snippage.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:56, 21 August 2015 (UTC)

Sorry we are talking of different service systems available both on phone lines just by chance! Plato system and Wievdata that you quote as predecessors are proprietary system and they require dedicated hardware such as terminals designed only for that purpose that were not available on common market as computers and modems (see France based wiewdata system called Minitel) and were given in license by phone providers (France Postal Service for Minitel, Italian State telephone Service SIPTEL for Videotel) and are subject to their own subscriptions (or perhaps users were charged on their phone bills as receiving a service apart) in order to being accessed. Despite these systems use phone lines to link users to a central provider and despite the fact these systems have something barely called BBS systems to publish announcements and chat lines, they are not related with the international Bulettin Board System Organization like FidoNet that was widely supported by Skypix, and that was not centralized, and mainly it was an international free organization supported by its own base and its own committees, and could be accessed by anyone with a computer and a modem. Also the systems you quoted as predecessors featured not a graphic system but used special characters different from ASCII-ANSI, and are more similar to semi-graphic characters on Commodore64 (for example). They could not support sound or music, and have just primitive beep sound to announce incoming calls or messages. Skypix allowed a standard set of graphic icons that were shown on a software windows on standard GUI of Amiga desktop. Skypix allowed transmission of data, music, images,, text messages, 8svx audio clips (to exchange ausio messages between users), using normal BBS protocol just enhanced by some commands made using a prefix and standard ASCII characters, hence thus Skypix predates other multimedia systems like internet.
 * I'm sorry, but the statements you make above are simply not true. PLATO, Quantum Link and Telidon were complete vector-graphics systems. PLATO was available on the Atari 8-bit machines in 1984, Quantum Link was available for the C64 in 1985. Telidon became NAPLPS and was used as the basis of Prodigy in 1984. Both PLATO and QL supported sound and music. None of these were based on custom character sets, as you claim above, although they all supported them. I'm sorry, but you need to research these systems more thoroughly before making statements like this. Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:28, 28 September 2017 (UTC)

Problems with date and first source
The second sentence of this article says "The system was written by Michael Cox on the Amiga in 1987".

To support this assertion, it cites part of an email to Jason Scott, producer/director of The BBS Documentary, from Scott Lee, a later maintainer of the SkyPix technology. The relevant passage of Lee's email says "This was all around the '87 time frame which I think pegs it as the first graphical point & click BBS UI..." (emphasis added)

This is hardly authoritative. It's just a vague recollection.

(Making it worse, the WP citation lists the publisher as "Jason Scott for Wired Magazine (?)". This is nonsensical. The excerpted email is hosted on Jason Scott's bbsdocumentary.com website, which has nothing to do with Wired.)

I would suggest removing this source, and changing 1987 to 1988. Please see Talk:Bulletin_board_system for further details supporting "1988".

Kirkman (talk) 00:42, 16 April 2024 (UTC)

Hearing no dissent, I have corrected the article with changes based on my argument above.

Kirkman (talk) 13:56, 2 May 2024 (UTC)