ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)

ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019)
vice.com

... maybe not that much :)

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.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

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.svenss...

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.

> 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.

    ( .Y. )