The French minitel in mid-80s was successful also thanks to online porn. It was not using the internet (not TCP-IP network), but it was pushing the ASCII art to its limits :)
A TV show revolving around this exact period titled « 3615 Monique » (« Cheeky Business » in English) was released in 2020. A kind of french « Social Network » in some way, pretty cool
I don't understand why. One has a name that includes "poop" in Spanish, is that why? Vice usually doesn't shy away from things so not sure why they'd do it here.
I wish the article mentioned Computer Nude (1967) by Ken Knowlton. It isn't ASCII, but it is a text mosaic. It was widely circulated at the time, was the first full frontal nude printed in The New York Times, and was somewhat important in the development of computer graphics.
Due to the effective destruction of the printer ribbon and consequently effects on printer life cycle, printing the overstrike art was banned at my uni in 1979. The ops had one of the multi sheet 132 column nude printouts on the wall for a while but after complaints it was removed.
Back in the days I used to help (for free, I was ~13 and nobody asked) moderating a big free-hosting Italian service.
It had a pretty smart business model: hosting was free, but any ads the webmaster wanted to show had to come from the hosting provider and the ad revenue would be shared between the webmaster and the hosting provider.
One of the terms of service was no porn. As you can imagine one of the webmasters made this very successful website, with ads, showing pictures of women and a lot of people thought it was indeed porn.
When the hosting provider closed his account the webmaster brought in lawyers to dispute his ban, and just like that we discovered that in Italy the rule is (ish) that there needs to be penetration to qualify, so the ban had to be reverted.
American culture is very prudish, courtesy of its Puritanical roots which even today cause us to label a woman sucking off an enormous penis (like in "Deep ASCII", referenced in article) as so-called "pornography".
Nudes are not always porn, but that doesn't mean they can't be porn either. Ultimately I would say it comes down to whether the intent is to titillate, but of course porn is notoriously hard to define.
I would say that if there's no depiction of a sexual act, or any gestures or body poses suggesting an invitation to a sexual act, it's not pornography. While I can't necessarily pinpoint where the threshold lies, without certain ingredients like these, it's far from it.
But about a third of HN has wanked to John McCarthy's metacircular implementation of Lisp in Lisp, so that is porn.
And, look, he basically even admitted it in History of Lisp, in a paragraph directly referencing the implementation of the above interpreter:
"The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the form
of the language, and some of the decisions made rather lightheartedly for the
“Recursive functions ...” paper later proved unfortunate. These included
the COND notation for conditional expressions which leads to an unnecessary
depth of parentheses, and the use of the number zero to denote the empty
list NIL and the truth value false. Besides encouraging pornographic
programming, giving a special interpretation to the address 0 has caused
difficulties in all subsequent implementations."
It was pornographic programming, as admitted by the author, and hackers wank to it in a circle to this day. Open and shut case, pretty much.
Back in the day, I've actually seen ASCII images and animations that would qualify as porn cartoons, so I don't have to survey the presently referenced materials in detail. The majority that are just naked women in a standing pose showing bush and boobs are not porn.
Being naked isn't porn.
Otherwise we would ask, "where were you porn" rather than "where were you born".
Dutch viditel had porn; stories with 'graphics' and BBSs I used had also porn stories with ascii art. It was what I could get with a 300 baud modem. At 9600 baud, I could download grainy msx 2 porn images finally. There were even 'movies' (usually 2 images swapping over)!
It's funny. Some of the physical wall art I collect has a similar character of walking the line of tacky, like a psychopathic 16-year-old bully's pin-up spank fodder from the '80s, to exuding inherent value independent of sexuality. It goes between the authentic Soviet propaganda posters and the defunct radio station stickers signed by Frank Zappa.
Then you would have loved the HyperCard Smut Stack, the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released!
I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious.
Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack:
DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham?
SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.
>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.
>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.
>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.
>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.
>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”
>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.
>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.
Readit News
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-24-mn-718-st...
and it made some people rich https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/le-monde-t...
https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/
http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca
Thanks for sharing them here at least.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/technology/ken-knowlton-d...
(Tops 10, chain printer)
Is "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli also porn?
Back in the days I used to help (for free, I was ~13 and nobody asked) moderating a big free-hosting Italian service.
It had a pretty smart business model: hosting was free, but any ads the webmaster wanted to show had to come from the hosting provider and the ad revenue would be shared between the webmaster and the hosting provider.
One of the terms of service was no porn. As you can imagine one of the webmasters made this very successful website, with ads, showing pictures of women and a lot of people thought it was indeed porn.
When the hosting provider closed his account the webmaster brought in lawyers to dispute his ban, and just like that we discovered that in Italy the rule is (ish) that there needs to be penetration to qualify, so the ban had to be reverted.
Deleted Comment
That is the thing with censorship, it isn't consequent.
But about a third of HN has wanked to John McCarthy's metacircular implementation of Lisp in Lisp, so that is porn.
And, look, he basically even admitted it in History of Lisp, in a paragraph directly referencing the implementation of the above interpreter:
"The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the form of the language, and some of the decisions made rather lightheartedly for the “Recursive functions ...” paper later proved unfortunate. These included the COND notation for conditional expressions which leads to an unnecessary depth of parentheses, and the use of the number zero to denote the empty list NIL and the truth value false. Besides encouraging pornographic programming, giving a special interpretation to the address 0 has caused difficulties in all subsequent implementations."
It was pornographic programming, as admitted by the author, and hackers wank to it in a circle to this day. Open and shut case, pretty much.
Being naked isn't porn.
Otherwise we would ask, "where were you porn" rather than "where were you born".
I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious.
Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack:
https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675
DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)
Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham? SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-...
>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.
>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.
>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.
https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl...
Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990
>Famham's Choice
>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.
>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”
>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.
https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer...
Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110
>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.