I’ve seen things discussing when the first email was sent and when the first spam was sent, but I’ve not seen anything about the first appearance of porn on the net (be it email or website). Given porn is the primary purpose for the net for many people, I figure that there’s got to be a record out there somewhere about it. And let’s observe the board rules and not link to anything NSFW, M’kay?
I think one of the earliest on the Web must have been Romana Machado, who posted naked pictures of herself on her website (which still exists), but I think the Usenet binaries groups had pr0n before that.
No clue, but I bet the question depends on how you define ‘porn.’ Does written erotica count? How about ASCII art?
About 1992 or 1993 I visited the original alt.sex newsgroup - which had not grown into many, and was relatively low volume. This was well before pictures or binaries. It was reasonably well established at the time.
The PLATO system had a cunnilingus simulator by 1977 - not quite the net as we know it today, though.
If written counts, alt.sex was created, apparently, in 1988.
alt.sex was created 3rd April, 1988, 1754 PST more precisely (from the same site, both SFW).
Put it this way - it was probably transmitted between Stanford and UCLA in 1969.
(The first two ARPANET nodes. What’s more, it WAS “69” and they were Sigma 7’s running SEX.)
If we’re limiting this to the web, remember that the first graphical web browser (Mosaic) was developed by grad students at the NCSA at UIUC. My understanding is that easily sharing and browsing dirty pictures was chief among the motivations for the project.
In all likelihood, porn was the “Watson, come here! I need you!” of the world wide web.
Thanks. I don’t remember exactly when I grabbed a set of UNIX PCs for my group. I connected through a Bell Labs netnews server - I think the concept of NSFW hadn’t been invented yet.
Porn on the net predates Mosaic by quite a lot, though.
I got ASCII art of nekkid women from a Billboard in 1985-ish. Plus there were a few erotic games (strip poker, people-pong) that one could get their hands on through those systems back then. I saw my first internet pr0n pic in 1993/94 at college. We were MUDing late at night and I turned around and someone had downloaded a pic of a girl in a compromising position. “Hmmm…so I can waste my time in more ways than online games…”
-Tcat
Downloading porn on 2400 modems off BBS systems in the late 80s wasn’t uncommon (aww yes, only 14 minutes till 1 picture. boobies!!!) Not exactly the internet in a technical sense.
I’ve seen it. It was a semi-nude pic of Al Gore.
Me too. My friend Dave, who only lived in our house during the Spring '04 semester showed us some pictures he’d downloiaded from binaries (one of which is still burned in my brain because it was pretty weird). Also in that same timeframe my friend Mike wanted to see some porn so I found a site for him. But even though it was around on the Web that early, it’s not like it is now, You had to hunt around a bit, whereas today perfectly innocent Google searches turn up all sorts of stuff.
–Cliffy
Ahh, those were the days (though for me it was '91 when I was doing that.) We’d log on to the local BBS at night, queue about 10 nekkid photos for download (each about 150k) and wait a few hours for all of them to download. In the morning? Jackpot! 
BBSes aren’t the Internet (as long as ‘BBS’ is taken to mean ‘direct-dialing a remote computer that is not an ISP’) but the more interesting question is ‘What was the first porn (of any kind) on a computer network (of any kind)?’
Here is a directory of RTTY art of women, most of which would be called pornographic by most standards. I don’t know how complex RTTY terminals were; if they were only capable of printing in response to electrical impulses, as was the ASR-33, they weren’t computers at all. But this is still interesting.
It would jhave been quicker to walk to the corner store and buy a Penthouse, fer Christ’s sake!
(once again I am glad that by the time I experienced the internet, high speed was the name of the game.)
No kidding! I’d love to know the history of those files, including who had that much time on their hands!
Hee-hee. I just got Tripod’s Middleborough Road album …
I know, but it didn’t have the wow factor to it.
And, at the time, I wasn’t old enough to buy a Penthouse.