In 1994, the New York Times published a story with one of its more vivid titles which has stuck in my head ever since: "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress"

In 1994, the New York Times published a story with one of its more vivid titles which has stuck in my head ever since: "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress" [0]. It makes the point that at many key moments of technological development throughout history, porn has driven adoption of new tech. Expensive VCR sales (and perhaps apocryphally, VHS winning over Beta due to Sony shunning porn) was driven by porn availability. Bulletin Board Systems, chat rooms, CD-ROMs, etc. all had pornographic elements, even if it was just stories or text chat. The referenced article in this thread mentions some of the history of the Lena image, but Wired did a good job finding the actual woman in question and talking about some of the social history. [1] I was never on the Well, Fidonet, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy or any other BBS systems, but from this article [2] you can see that low-res text-based block character "images" were possible. The minute you can make something display an image, someone is going to figure out how to put porn on it. Apparently there was MacPlaymate, a 1-bit image depth interactive program (distributed on 3.5" floppies) from 1986. NSFW [3] Usenet was definitely part of the early mass sharing of porn online, but as far as I can tell image binaries date (e.g. alt.sex.pictures.erotica.* or alt.sex.binaries.*) more to early 1990s, not 80s. Downloading low-res images over a 14.4 modem in multiple UUencoded text messages based only on a title (or perhaps a frequent, trusted poster) and re-constructing them into a GIF or JPG was very very slow, but where there's a will there's a way - or so I'm told... [0] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/09/arts/porn-the-low-slung-engine-of-progress.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/09/arts/porn-the-low-slung-e... [1] https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of-jpegs/ https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of... [2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-bulletin-board-system https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-... [3] https://imgur.com/a/LhTrq https://imgur.com/a/LhTrq