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ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
- zootboy 2y agoIt's kind of funny that every example the article shows is a screenshot or video. Not a single one was actual ASCII text in the HTML...
- DonHopkins 2y agoDRM
- california-og 2y agoIt's not trivial to display ASCII art as text in html. There's so many ways to mess it up that unless the site is dedicated to ASCII art, a simple image is really preferable.
- Groxx 2y ago<pre> works pretty reliably
- california-og 2y agoFor whitespace and for the simplest ASCII sure, but for anything a bit more complex you might have problems with 1. HTML reserved characters like < > and \. 2. overflowing content 3. displaying ASCII made with special encodings and characters sets, like code page 437 4. displaying nonprintable (control) characters 5. displaying colors 6. text preprocessors messing up the formatting
- pastage 2y agothe Virtual terminal[1] from Asciinema[2] is what I use but that is a lot more difficult than just including a video of it. I got CMS from a very expensive CMS to support Asciinema but it was actually too much effort to be worth it I had to recompile some components make a editor interface etc etc. [1]https://github.com/asciinema/avt https://github.com/asciinema/avt [2]https://docs.asciinema.org/how-it-works/ https://docs.asciinema.org/how-it-works/
- 0xDEADFED5 2y agocheck out my website: https://terminoid.com/discover/ https://terminoid.com/discover/ i still need to add seeking and stuff, but it works. like asciinema but based on xterm.js
- diggan 2y agoMost of those are solved with wrapping it in both <code> and <pre>, and #5 I don't think is even part of "ASCII art" anymore as it wouldn't be just ASCII anymore, but rich-text.
- california-og 2y agoWhat do you mean? Add far as I know <code><pre> doesn't help with any of those? Color is very much a part of ASCII art, if we consider ASCII to mean a broader range of different technologies. Just check the stuff in the article, or the stuff on https://16colo.rs/ https://16colo.rs/ site.
- omolobo 2y ago[dead]
- Groxx 2y agoAaah. None of these fancier ones were loading for me earlier for some reason, all I got was the clearly-mono-spaced one in the header. Yeah, for non-ASCII / more sophisticated stuff, images are kinda the only widely-compatible option without adopting a full terminal emulator worth of javascript.
- pino82 2y agoNone of these points seem to be relevant when it comes to the question about ASCII art as text in html vs image. Most of them feel to be no actual problems at all, but only someone vaguely mentioned some keywords in order to 'find' problems?
- tetris11 2y agoPre differs browser to browser
- diggan 2y agoSure, they might not be pixel-perfect, but if you're doing ASCII art you aren't really aiming for pixel-perfectness anyways, then you'd chose a different medium. It's inherently a medium for the clients to render how they see fit.
- pino82 2y agoCan you tell about some?
- california-og 2y agoCheck my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42572483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42572483
- nenaoki 2y ago4chan's /jp/ has [sjis] bbcode tags for formatting ASCII art consistently with the Mona typeface. No thread up though, and the archive doesn't support the tags.
- ekianjo 2y agoHow is that non trivial? You just need to use a monospace font and control for width
- Retric 2y agoYou also need to preprocess the text to deal with HTML reserved characters like < Getting an individual piece of ASCII art to work is often possible reasonably quickly, but the more examples you want to include the more odd edge cases you find.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- weMadeThat 2y agoThey should make a dating app out of that.
- Bluestein 2y agoWell ... CNN says dating apps are changing ... ... maybe not that much :)
- weMadeThat 2y agotoo bad, I guess, :P ASCII Porn doesn't just sound, sorry, look like less is more. It literally translates into so much more than it actually is.
- DonHopkins 2y agoDick pics like 8=====D would be on the honor system.
- pino82 2y agoIt reminds me of sooo many things. Maybe it's part of a kitchen tool. Or gardening, a weapon, you name it. But by no means it looks like a dick. :-/
- DonHopkins 2y agoEBCDIC porn really punched my cards. ;) I had to carefully select just the characters that would punch low resolution monochrome pornographic images into the holes of the punch card. Just joking, I'm not that old -- I started with ASCII line printer porn, like "MC:HUMOR;VICKI BODY", over the government sponsored ARPANET, at 300 baud, so it was like a nice long strip tease on taxpayer dollars. Vicki took almost 4 and a half minutes to finish at that rate, longer during busy weekday business hours. If I recall, the good stuff was all UPPER CASE, which made it much more intense. NSFW: https://web.archive.org/web/20210512025608/http://its.svensson.org/HUMOR%3bVICKI%20BODY https://web.archive.org/web/20210512025608/http://its.svenss... Decades later, somebody on HN with a sharper eye than I noticed that Vicki's nipples were clearly labeled "A" and "B". Go figure! HN: Should computer scientists keep the Lena picture? (lemire.me) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15671629 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15671629 DonHopkins on Nov 10, 2017 | parent | context | favorite | on: Should computer scientists keep the Lena picture? Does "AI:HUMOR;VICKI BODY" get grandfathered in, too? NSFW: MS C0LLINS - 0UI - FEBRUARY 1973: https://web.archive.org/web/20210512025608/http://its.svensson.org/HUMOR%3bVICKI%20BODY https://web.archive.org/web/20210512025608/http://its.svenss... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause mercer on Nov 11, 2017 [–] Is the nipples being marked 'A' and 'B' part of the joke? DonHopkins on Nov 11, 2017 | parent [–] As far as I know, those were not the points of the joke. I noticed them for the first time yesterday too, after not noticing them for decades! As a teen, I'd printed it out, pinned it up on my wall next to the Cray-1 centerfold, and scribbled a bunch of modem phone numbers, user names and passwords all over it, and never even noticed. I did a quick search for other A's and B's and found that it used those characters as much as any other character for shading, but that sure seems like something some mischievous student, lab member, turist or sentient TECO script at the MIT-AI Lab might have done. There was no file security so anyone could have edited them in. Maybe one of Minsky's grad students was performing some A/B testing or eye tracking experiments. Somebody should ask RMS if EMACS had some special mode for editing line printer porn.
- dualboot 2y agoPredates the web but not the internet.
- stephenr 2y agoLiterally from the article, emphasis is mine: > An ASCII artist who goes by the screen name “goto80” told me in an email that, according to his research, the first modern text-based porn was probably sent via teletext. Teletext was a late 70s pre-internet technology for sending text and graphics to a television set, that never quite took off in the way people thought it would at the time.
- dualboot 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
- stephenr 2y agoWhat point are you trying to make? Arpanet is not the internet and the internet is not Arpanet. The claim wasn't that it predates any wide area network. It was that it predates the Internet, a specific well known wide area network.
- dualboot 2y agoYour lack of understanding of the history of the internet is really not any of my business nor concern.
- kmoser 2y agoNot saying goto80 is wrong, but I'd like to know what his research found and why he's qualifying it with "probably".
- ochrist 2y agoTeletext is still used in several countries. Also, I have seen ascii art on telex-type machines. These are limited by using only five bits, and so you can only use lowercase characters (or uppercase, but not both). There are some examples here: http://artscene.textfiles.com/rtty/RTTYCOM/ http://artscene.textfiles.com/rtty/RTTYCOM/
- deadbabe 2y agoWonder if ASCII porn is a viable OnlyFans niche
- Onavo 2y agoTime to put on my robes and wizard hat.
- NicholasGurr 2y agoHere, let me answer that for you: No.
- matbatt38 2y agoI wouldn't underestimate it
- drekipus 2y ago( .Y. )
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago8->+o
- llsf 2y agoThe 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 :) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-24-mn-718-story.html 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-to-be-taken-over-by-tycoon-who-built-fortune-on-porn-2012264.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/le-monde-t...
- Foobar8568 2y agoI remember there were ads everywhere for stuff like 3615 ULLA, magazine, billboards, any walls etc. Crazy time.
- rmnclmnt 2y agoA 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
- m3kw9 2y agoI actuallly prefer this over the stuff they have now. It’s part art, part sleaze
- DonHopkins 2y agoThen 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: https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675 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-century-hypercard-stack/ 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/MacWorld_9008_August_1990_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl... Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990 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/NewComputerExpress110_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer... Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110 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.
- xyst 2y agofound new banners for my servers
- NooneAtAll3 2y ago> "People seem to assume any ASCII art is up for grabs, for free. But it is art, like any other image photographed, painted, etc." ...and my personal take is the opposite - it's the other types of art that should be as distributable as ASCII artists should be payed for creation, not for access to the works - that's how commissions work, and that's why AI pictures prospered and problem of "reselling of someone else's art" isn't in "re", but in "selling" as a whole
- diggan 2y ago> artists should be payed for creation, not for access to the works - that's how commissions work, and that's why AI pictures prospered Looking through 1929s art that just entered public domain now in 2025, that's something that surprised me, how much of that stuff was commissioned by some wealthy individual who paid up front. Lots of popular stuff was created that way it seems, while I don't think that's nearly as popular to do today.
- kazinator 2y agoThese are nudes, not porn. Is "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli also porn?
- khazhoux 2y agoAmerican 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".
- pjmlp 2y agoYeah, but blowing up people on TV shows, with blood and body parts going everywhere is perfectly alright. That is the thing with censorship, it isn't consequent.
- bigstrat2003 2y agoDifferent cultures each have their own standards for what is and is not considered offensive, and each culture thinks that its standards are correct. That isn't hypocrisy, it's just how this whole topic works. There are no two human cultures in history which have entirely agreed on what is and isn't offensive, so why do people feel the need to pick on Americans specifically? It strikes me as extremely narrow-minded.
- pjmlp 2y agoBecause Americans love to push their standards on the rest of the world, specially American companies with high control of Internet contents. Then again, the current geopolitic clima has proven the time we are supposed to be all friends across the technology field, is coming to an end, and every nation is better off putting effort in ramping up with own siloed technology with less dependency in foreign nations.
- wiseowise 2y ago> so why do people feel the need to pick on Americans specifically Who is the main exporter of entertainment in the world?
- california-og 2y agoI 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. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/technology/ken-knowlton-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/technology/ken-knowlton-d...
- hooli_gan 2y agohttps://archive.is/6RHVb https://archive.is/6RHVb
- ggm 2y agoDue 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. (Tops 10, chain printer)
- rincebrain 2y agoI understand why, but still feel it's a missed opportunity, for them to have not referenced libcaca/aalib in the "for more information" sections. https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/ https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/ http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca
- diggan 2y agoI 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. Thanks for sharing them here at least.
- tessierashpool9 2y agoI wonder if ASCII art could be improved by UNICODE art due to many more shapes available.
- anonzzzies 2y agoDutch 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)!
- Bluestein 2y agoReally brings to mind that thought about "tech being driven by porn as a first use case" ... ... rule 34.5? :)
- aspeckt-112 2y agoI remember finding ASCII porn online as a kid in the late 90’s and finding it the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen in my 11 years on the planet. Honestly, I’d never really thought about it again until reading this. It actually gave me a good appreciation for it. There’s a pretty insane amount of detail in it. Quite the commitment.
- systems_glitch 2y agoThere's an old LCM (Living Computer Museum, RIP) video where they run off a card deck of a risque ASCII art program on an IBM mainframe's line printer. It feigns a printer fault after printing the subject down to the shoulders, only to finish the print suddenly (line printers are fast!) when the operator has gone over to the printer. IIRC the original livestream was unprepared for that :P
- casenmgreen 2y agoI have literally never seen ASCII porn, and I've been on the net since 1994.
- msarrel 2y agoI remember printing this stuff out as a teenager because I thought it was funny... And getting in trouble for it.