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Comment by jack_riminton | Hacker News Reader

I haven't seen much written about the impact of porn on technological advancement. I guess its rather a dark, parallel history that no one really talks about

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Sexuality is one of the biggest internal and external influencer on everything we do in life. Work, pleasure, friends and also technology. Sex is what identifies us. Yet, in de west, specially in the US people find it very difficult to talk about it. Some groups (religious or not) even deliberately try to cover everything up resulting in perverse behaviour which unfortunately is also very high in the US.

"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power" - Oscar Wilde

> Yet, in de west, specially in the US people find it very difficult to talk about it.

It sounds like you have a specific, non-western culture in mind which finds it very easy to talk about about sex.

Which is it?

I don't know much about the culture specifically, but I'm reminded of the story about the Indonesian president whom the KGB tried to blackmail by taping him being seduced by two flight attendants.

> Before starting the blackmail, KGB invited Sukarno in a small private movie theatre and showed him the pornographic video, in which he was playing the main part. KGB agents were expecting him to get really frightened, that he would agree to cooperate with them at once, but everything happened vice versa: Sukarno fondly decided that it was a gift from the Soviet government, so he asked for more copies to take them back to Indonesia and show them in movie theatres. Sukarno said to flabbergasted agents that the people of Indonesia would be very proud of him, if they could see him doing the nasty with Russian girls.

Apparently the CIA also got in on the action, producing a fake sex tape of Sukarno, in order to kick off a revolution (to oust Sukarno).

More details here (along with the KBG story): https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-and-kgb-tried-to-bl...

I would guess they would point to Asia, or Europe.

Even though asian countries view sex as just another thing and not so much sex positive.

In 1994, the New York Times published a story with one of its more vivid titles which has stuck in my head ever since: "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress" [0]. It makes the point that at many key moments of technological development throughout history, porn has driven adoption of new tech. Expensive VCR sales (and perhaps apocryphally, VHS winning over Beta due to Sony shunning porn) was driven by porn availability. Bulletin Board Systems, chat rooms, CD-ROMs, etc. all had pornographic elements, even if it was just stories or text chat.

The referenced article in this thread mentions some of the history of the Lena image, but Wired did a good job finding the actual woman in question and talking about some of the social history. [1]

I was never on the Well, Fidonet, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy or any other BBS systems, but from this article [2] you can see that low-res text-based block character "images" were possible. The minute you can make something display an image, someone is going to figure out how to put porn on it.

Apparently there was MacPlaymate, a 1-bit image depth interactive program (distributed on 3.5" floppies) from 1986. NSFW [3]

Usenet was definitely part of the early mass sharing of porn online, but as far as I can tell image binaries date (e.g. alt.sex.pictures.erotica.* or alt.sex.binaries.*) more to early 1990s, not 80s. Downloading low-res images over a 14.4 modem in multiple UUencoded text messages based only on a title (or perhaps a frequent, trusted poster) and re-constructing them into a GIF or JPG was very very slow, but where there's a will there's a way - or so I'm told...

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/09/arts/porn-the-low-slung-e...

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...

[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-...

[3] https://imgur.com/a/LhTrq

porn is at the front of technological advancement. Was doing reverse billed SMS payment systems for mobile content early 2000s, and our biggest customers were porn sites.

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