Subject: Searching for depressing moments of Internet history.....

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 17:03:01 +0100

Despite having lived through much recent history, I've forgotten a lot of 
it....

I just wonder: does anyone know/remember when the first Web porn site came 
online?

Wondering whether it was before or after the first official release of 
Mosaic....

                       Harald

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From: Eliot Lear <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 15:49:31 -0800

If you are looking for the first site that spoke HTTP, then I don't 
know.  On the other hand, as we know there has been a history of 
development surrounding Internet porn.  First of all, there were the 
various newsgroups, and the various (dis)assembly programs.  One of 
these was AUB and it dates back to around 1992.  Another of which was 
FSP, the UDP-based file sharing protocol written to get around TCP port 
filters.  That would be in the 1993 time frame.  While to the best of my 
knowledge IRC had no attachment to sex for its development, it in 
combination with various hacker sites played a role in sites being 
hacked and becoming warez and porn sites.

Eliot

Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
> Despite having lived through much recent history, I've forgotten a lot 
> of it....
> 
> I just wonder: does anyone know/remember when the first Web porn site 
> came online?
>

---

From: Peter Deutsch <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 17:25:39 -0800

g'day,

There was also a certain amount of piggybacking onto legitimate open FTP
sites to deliver porn going on for a while that predated the web by
years.

Back in those more innocent days some folks actually left their incoming
FTP directories open  and apparently there arose an "on-demand" file
delivery service, in which folks would post requests for specific files
and the pusher would push it into a well-known open FTP directory for
pickup, then delete it so people wouldn't know it was going on. It was
being used for porn, and also for various other contraband stuff
(cracking programs, etc). I found out about this when the campus
Director of Computing called that he'd received a complaint from NSF
about McGill's "porn site", which was located on one of our departmental
machines (NSF was sharing the cost of the link to Canada, felt this
violated the AUP and wanted it shut down NOW...) By the time I got to a
terminal to check things out, all the bad stuff was gone, but yes we had
a machine with an open directory, and when we started monitoring it, we
saw lots of stuff coming and going until we closed it up.

Off the top of my head, I'd say this would have been about 1989-89 or
so. Others may have anecdotal evidence pushing it further back than
that.

				- peterd

-- 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
    Peter Deutsch                       [email-masked]
                      Gydig Software

          "No, Harry - even in the wizarding world,
            hearing voices is not a good sign..."

                            - Hermione Granger

------------------------------------------------------------------

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From: Dave Crocker <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Jan 2003 17:35:17 -0800

Folks,

In the early '70s, an ARPA database research company, called Computer
Corporation of America (CCA) had a service that allowed you to make a telnet
connection to a special port.

It would spit out a randomly-selected limerick and then close the
connection.

Almost all the limericks were filthy enough to surprise hardened limerick
afficionados.

d/

ps. If you submitted 3 new limericks that they added to the database, you would
get a copy of the entire set.

Sunday, January 12, 2003, 3:49:31 PM, you wrote:
Eliot> If you are looking for the first site that spoke HTTP, then I don't 
Eliot> know.  On the other hand, as we know there has been a history of 
Eliot> development surrounding Internet porn.  First of all, there were the 
Eliot> various newsgroups, and the various (dis)assembly programs.  One of 
Eliot> these was AUB and it dates back to around 1992.

d/
-- 
 Dave <mailto:[email-masked]>
 Brandenburg InternetWorking <http://www.brandenburg.com>
 t +1.408.246.8253; f +1.408.850.1850

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From: jfcm <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 10:53:03 +0100

>Wondering whether it was before or after the first official release of 

Obviously depends on what you mean "on-line".
1. as Dave said there were sex oriented "areas" on many computers.
2. I suppose the first commercial sex sites were on Minitel.
3. This means that technically they were on-line from the Internet legal 
perspective when it interconnected the public nets (84). Actually a few 
Internet private gateways existed before and some Intelmatics tests were 
probably carried in the USA as early as 1982, with protocol conversion. I 
would be surprised that no one test connected them from ARPANET. When 
people tested from abroad, I do not know why, they always did it with a 
porn site.
4.UK Universities also shared into Prestel and some where on the Internet 
(you should inquire there. They had a leading data brokering firm that 
"on-line", I Oxford (?) I think). I do not know about Paris University, but 
we can investigate.
jfc

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 11:04:16 +0100

just to be clear - I was thinking of porn sites using the HTTP protocol for 
access.

Best so far: Paul Hoffman thinks that the first one was called "Adult 
Action", and probably predated the official Mosaic release. But that search 
term is too general for the Internet of today (8240 hits.... sigh...)

Thanks to all who responded!

                 Harald

--On mandag, januar 13, 2003 10:53:03 +0100 jfcm <[email-masked]> wrote:

> porn site. 4.UK Universities also shared into Prestel and some where on
> the Internet (you should inquire there. They had a leading data brokering
> firm that "on-line", I Oxford (?) I think). I do not know about Paris
> University, but we can investigate. jfc

---

From: "[email-masked]" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 07:04:07 -0600

By June and July of 1994 people were trying
adult http sites.  I'm afraid it's not clear how long 
before this these sites actually existed.
I can tell you that there were very few adult sites
in 1994.  By 1996 the formula and format for such
sites was pretty well fixed and that same formula 
and format is still used on 99% of sites today.
Why the creation of the first porn site is a 
depressing moment I'm not sure.  In the first
couple years of the web, adult sites financed it's
development.  In 1997 and 1998 90% of commerce
on the web was adult related.  Within two years 
of the first nudie pic being served via http the 
adult operators had developed workable streaming
video.	A year later, in 1997, we installed the first 
live video with audio streaming from a Dallas office.

  Adult operators also developed technologies such 
as digital watermarking, the pay per click advertising
model, and usable http payment processing gateways
long before these technologies were adopted by 
mainstream companies.  One of the biggest things to 
make the web the commercially attractive was efficient
online payment processing.  The first http 3rd party 
payment processing service was started in March 
of 1995 by my friend Laith Alsarraf.  It would be 
another TWO YEARS before mainstream sites had
a comparable online processor.

Porn sites filtered:
Date: 1994-07-08 18:37:06 PST 
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=naked+http&start=60&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF
-8&as_drrb=b&as_mind=1&as_minm=1&as_miny=1994&as_maxd=13&as_maxm=7&as_maxy=1994
&selm=1994Jul8.110718.18031%40umiami.ir.miami.edu&rnum=69

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ray B. Morris
[email-masked]
http://www.WebmastersGuide.com

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From: Zefram <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 15:03:19 +0000

[email-masked] wrote:
>depressing moment I'm not sure.

A few years ago I found myself wondering why most commercial websites
are so garish, flashy, fragmented, and awkward to navigate.  I came to
the conclusion that they'd all taken their stylistic lead from the very
first commercial websites: the porn sites.  Is it not depressing that
porn-pushing techniques have been adopted into, and come to dominate,
mainstream commerce?

(Happy lynx user here, it's not often that I'm forced to see how visually
appalling these sites have been designed to be.)

-zefram

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From: Dan Riley <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Jan 2003 13:08:31 -0500

"[email-masked]" <[email-masked]> writes:
> In the first couple years of the web, adult sites financed it's
> development.  In 1997 and 1998 90% of commerce on the web was adult
> related.

The first few years of the web were financed by government funded
research laboratories--initially CERN in Europe starting in 1990,
followed by NCSA and others in late 1992.  Commercial use didn't
become a significant factor until 1994--until then the Internet was
effectively ruled by the NSFNet backbone "no commercial use" policy.
(There was certainly lots of porn on the internet before then, but
not lots of money being made--most of the money-making porn was
still on BBSs.)

-dan

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From: Simon Spero <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 13:26:30 -0500

> I just wonder: does anyone know/remember when the first Web porn site 

I believe Kapor's law was first stated at the January '92 Usenix (The 
first use for any new communications technology is sex).

Anyone remember the day when someone found a world-writable directory 
somewhere on the official X distribution site at MIT,which promptly got 
picked up by all the nightly mirrors (many of which then got indexed by 
archie)...

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From: John Stracke <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 14:20:35 -0500

> first use for any new communications technology is sex).

Not exactly a new phenomenon--the oldest statues known, going back over 
20,000 years, are figures of nude women.  Objecting to it is like 
getting depressed about the fact that we still need to eat.

-- 
/=============================================\
|John Stracke      [email-masked]      |
|Principal Engineer|http://www.centive.com    |
|Centive           |My opinions are my own.   |
|=============================================|
|Cogito ergo Spud. (I think, therefore I yam.)|
\=============================================/

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From: Lloyd Wood <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 19:51:51 +0000 (GMT)

> first use for any new communications technology is sex).

any SUCCESSFUL communications technology, surely?

Think I've just discovered why 8-track failed, and gotten new insight
into that whole VHS vs Betamax thing.

As for getting funding to study this - doesn't anyone remember Marty
Rimm?
http://www.eff.org/Publications/Declan_McCullagh/www/rimm/

(and Time Magazine showing a lack of editorial standards long before
their Apple iMac advertorials.)

L.

<http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><[email-masked]>

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From: Scott W Brim <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 17:54:13 -0500

I have a vague recollection that CU-SeeMe was used for porn in late
1993.  We were so innocent, we thought people would use it for
conferencing.

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From: Franck Martin <[email-masked]>
Date: 14 Jan 2003 11:10:19 +1200

On Tue, 2003-01-14 at 07:51, Lloyd Wood wrote:

Well before that, the French had the minitel... France Telecom was a
long time ashamed to admit that the success of the service was entirely
due to adult services.

It has always been the case why:
The content is readily available or very quick to produce (no need to
write a thesis first)
The content is appalling to many customers

There is only one other area that has nearly the same qualities:
"VIOLENCE"

Unfortunately due to the good moral: "depressing moments" we tend now to
sell to our kids violence oriented games... no wonder that many people
in the world want to whack Irak. (I'm not neccessarily against whacking
irak, I just said it is crasy to think it will be easy and without great
pains).

Make Love not War... as they said...

How can the Internet Help?

Cheers.

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From: Pekka Savola <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 01:42:00 +0200 (EET)

> 1993.  We were so innocent, we thought people would use it for

Speaking of technologies, has porn ever been multicast?  Could have been a 
killer application in those times when bandwidth was scarce..

Perhaps that's why multicast never really kicked off..

-- 
Pekka Savola                 "You each name yourselves king, yet the
Netcore Oy                    kingdom bleeds."
Systems. Networks. Security. -- George R.R. Martin: A Clash of Kings

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 18:43:37 -0500

> any SUCCESSFUL communications technology, surely?

This must mean that 3G phones are destined to be sucessful...

http://media.guardian.co.uk/newmedia/story/0,7496,872546,00.html

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From: Dan Riley <[email-masked]>
Date: 13 Jan 2003 13:08:31 -0500

-dan

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From: Simon Spero <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 13 Jan 2003 13:26:30 -0500