Big-league adult content companies are getting into the "m" business. Or at least it should be, if the latest wave of pornography entrepreneurs is willing to pay attention to its own history. But in a weird display of how what goes around comes around applies even to the vagaries of online evolution, ASCII pr0n is suddenly important again.
Its low-res allure and retro cheese factor provide a cool, inspirational aesthetic for today's younger hackers.Īs an almost forgotten footnote of Net history, ASCII pr0n doesn't seem to have much relevance to an age begging for 3-D "fully immersive" stimulation. ASCII pr0n was of generally poor quality - so much so that its lameness was an in-group joke among hackers at the time - but it also recalls a beautiful, innocent era in many coders' lives. These ridiculously low-quality nudie picture-cum-text files were popular back in the days when putting photographs online was but a dream. It was the kind of sexual expression only a hardcore computer dork could love: ASCII pr0n jokes and pinups provided a common culture for a community of outcasts and misfits whose sex lives were portrayed by the mass media as weird or nonexistent. ASCII pr0n is a tribute to the time when bandwidth was limited on the Net, but creativity was high.Ĭreated in the late '70s and '80s, ASCII pr0n was the world's first Internet pornography. Newbies to the ASCII pr0n scene might be surprised to see what can be done with little more than a deftly placed comma and a whole bunch of ampersands. Before live nude streaming video, before the daily deluge of "click here for hot chix" spam, before the so-called adult Web was ever a glimmer in a would-be pornographer's eye, there was "ASCII pr0n." Spelled "pr0n" instead of "porn" in a typically obscure hacker joke, it consists of erotic art composed of the most basic elements: the ASCII character set - not much more than the alphabet, numbers and assorted punctuation marks.
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