[ih] Porn on the net

[John Levine]

It appears that Dave Taht via Internet-history <dave.taht at gmail.com> said:
>Prior to the advent of the vcr, where would porn on the arpanet have come
>from? Scanners? 8mm films? ASCII art?

There was certainly ASCII art. I recall one of a nude woman with
strategically placed close parens.

I don't remember many details but there were also FTP servers where
people swapped naughty GIFs, mostly scans from magazines. The picture
section of a server at a university disappeared one day, replaced by a
note saying that they'd put the material back if someone could explain
what its educational purpose was.

Early on it was all just single images. Video was too big for dialup
connections, and it took a while for people to build up libraries
of MPEGs and connections fast enough to download or stream them.

R's,
John