Nude pictures on early retro PCs – was it possible?

It's funny that you treat this as a theoretical tech question rather than, say, just asking one of us ancients who was there, Gandalf, 3000 years ago.

Yes, it was. The Commodore 128, for example, was even capable of displaying extremely short (probably 30 frames or so) hardcore porn loops in what was likely MCGA or the equivalent. I can say this without consulting manuals or spec sheets or anything but being a horny wee geek and seeing my first penetration on my neighbor and fellow adolescent nerd's little TV screen, after waiting a half hour for it to load from a floppy drive (pun intended). We felt like sophisticates at the Playboy Mansion.

Also I think I had one monochrome low res boob pic on my Apple IIe, which I hid from my parents like a serial killer hides his special trophy room, at least until I found the box of VHS tapes with the labels torn off under my grandpa's bed. After that, green boobs at like 120x60 resolution or whatever it is wasn't very exciting anymore.

So, yes. Yes, it definitely was. :-D

During the early 2000s, the dot-com bubble coincided with a telco bubble, with everybody working themselves into a lather over the promise of WAP, basically dial-up modems for mobile phones: slow, underpowered, charged per minute and thus hugely expensive. Working at a telco operator, I had access to the logs of the WAP gateways serving up the stuff, and far and away the top use was porn, with waperotica.com being particularly dominant.

The catch: this was way before smartphones. The Nokia 3310, a typical device at the time, had a 84x84 black and white (really more black and olive) display, considerably worse than the CP/M 256×192 panned in the article -- and still people watched porn on it.

I remember some kids in HS were distributing floppies of women with bathing suits and some "optimized" viewing program.

On the computer lab computers, 8086's, it would take several seconds if not minutes to render on the screen, one line at a time. That gave everyone plenty of time to escape out in case a teacher or someone else walked by. And there was only sky and trees and stuff mostly on the screen at that point.

Later on, a year or so later, the typing teacher got a 6 new computers, 386s. The first kid to try them out to look at the bathing suit pictures found that the images rendered instantly and completely. He was so stunned by seeing the entire image way sooner than he expected, but also, I guess, seeing the entire image itself. He let out a "Oh shit!" which caused the teacher to turn around and see the contraband on the screen.

Student had his disk confiscated and was banned from using the school's computers for the rest of the year.

Times were simpler then.

Grayscale animated gifs where the first introduction to porn. That was i386sx time. Like silent movies they had queue cards with some bollocks like "Shaved pussies are more slippery". 320x250 and 256 colors or 640x400/480 with 16 colors. Bearded blokes and hairy bushes looked really good at 640x400.

Add the corrupted JPEG here and there ... "right above the important area" of course. and you know, porn was also there.

I remember my mom showing me an ASCII print from a drum-roll printer (Mainframe) of a nude lady. So everything was possible ... (o)(o)

As a connoisseur of obscure Internet content, I can fix you up with some prime C64 smut right here and now. Behold a marvel of NSFW rasterization: http://www.heechee.net/c64/girls/

FTA: “If somebody was using the image scanning, viewing or editing software in the 80s or if somebody maybe has examples of such images, please write in comments”

The Thunderscan scanner, which allowed for (slow) five-bit grayscale scanning from a Mac or Apple II (https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...) is from 1984.

MacPlaymate (https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-hidden-and-charm...) is from 1986.

> Altair 8800 [...] and there was obviously no chance to see any photo on this device.

I'm not sure why? A basic Altair certainly seemed primitive from all appearances, but it supported S-100 expansion cards. This includes video such as the Cromemco Dazzler[1], which supported:

> while the highest resolution used a 2 kB buffer in X4 mode to produce a 128 by 128 pixel image.

And the later Super Dazzler:

> The Super Dazzler Interface (SDI) had 756 x 484 pixel resolution with the ability to display up to 4096 colors, a capability that had previously only been available in much more expensive systems.

You can see the Super Dazzler in action on YouTube[2]. And while it was generally equipped on much more capable machines, it theoretically could be used on the 8800 to display a static image.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Dazzler

2 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3EmCf1fw4s

Retro PC? How about ASCII printouts (not on-screen as the 80 column 25 rows black-n-white (actually dark green and light green) screens weren't enough even with our high school freshman imagination) off USSR clone of IBM/360 in the 198x - couple meters long at something like 200 characters per row, and had to be viewed from a distance of like 3 meters to see the picture instead of just rows of ASCII ... Running and collecting the printout from the University datacenter so that the typical operator there - a young woman - wouldn't catch you was a Mission Impossible endeavor on itself.

For the original question - i think we humans had always been making it possible using whatever tech is available at the time, for example i think that is "nude pictures" too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine

For those who pined for the old days … of real ASCII nude.

NSFW?

http://www.roysac.com/asciinudes/default.html

In 1988-89, I was a young teenager, I remembered I got a floppy with an erotic picture on my Amiga 500 using the HAM mode which allowed 4096 colours simultaneously. The image was quite realistic, which contrasted with the usual 32 colors graphics. Back then, it wasn't usual to see something looking like an actual picture on a computer screen.

So I remembered showing this picture to some friend, to brague about my computer capabilities, when my conservative grandma entered the room and saw the pictures. She was shocked and started lecturing us on love and sex.

Does this count? Because this raised some eyebrows at the local Apple store when I was a wee teen:

https://archive.org/details/mac_MacPlaymate

Plays right in the browser!

One thing the Mac had above all else available in 1986 was solid digitized sound, and this was no exception, so make sure to turn on sound and, uh, be somewhere private I guess...

Needless to say, NSFW!

I remember back in maybe 82 my grandfather bringing home from work, which was a construction company mind you, some tractor-feed printouts of various art from cartoon to nudies. Some were rudimentary line art, multi page pinups, some were more like the libaa sort of semi-photographic. He brought a stack of them home once as kind of a "look at what those crazy guys in the office did on the computer".

A few years later, maybe '85, I remember coming across a zine on Usenet that had an ascii-art nudie that I had to stare at and convince myself contained spicy content, but honestly could have been anything. I think it came from an underexposed photo, and low contrast, dark source makes a nasty, and not in the good way, ascii-art.

Ah, the days of trawling through ARCHIE listings to find an interesting-sounding file name, sending an email request to somewhere at umich.edu using a bang address, and receiving a dozen replies each containing sequentially-named uue files.

Manually strip the mail headers and paste the uue files together, run them through uudecode, and get a nifty file in Spectrum512 or Targa format that you can ogle on the screen of your Atari ST.

I think of those days every time I use `git am`. I doubt it's a coincidence.

Pre-internet breakthrough, circa 1991 I bought a friends 2400 baud modem. I lived in Hong Kong, local telephone calls were free so BBSes were pretty widespread.

I vividly remember downloading my first nude picture (I hesitate to call it porn, it was pretty tasteful compared to what you can find these days). It was pre-JPEG so think it was an uncompressed bitmap, I waited at least an hour for it to download 1 line at a time. It was tortuous, but ultimately satisfying.

As a 13 year old boy this helped cement my love of computers.

As a pragmatist, it gave me the courage to buy a magazine so not to have to wait 1 hr / picture.

I had 5 1/2" floppies with nudes in .GIF files in the 80's. Maybe 1988.

Our compiter room at school was populated with BBC model B machines and a couple of BBC Master systems.

Aside from playing Firetrak, we had the pleasure of one kid bringing in three disks of his dad's with grainy as hell images that titivated the schoolboys.

Me being the class geek, I used the dual floppy Master system to "copy that floppy" as our American friends were urged not to do, and promptly secreted the copies in my bag.

I no longer have them, sadly.

I remember picking up a pack of 5.25" disks at a yard sale for a buck, trying them out on the 8086 pc I had just rescued from the trash. One of them contained this: https://www.ush.it/team/ascii/hack-porno1989/porno1989/porno...

(works only on a CGA or monochrome card, use PCem or 86Box)

That time, when my parents entered the room and I quickly flipped the power switch, I also discovered the phosphor persistence of green screen monitors. And they did as well.

When I was a young teen my friend moved into a home that was owned by a retired sys admin. The guy had token ring ran through his house (it was 1994) and left an old AT&T PC6300 in the boiler room.

We plugged it in, booted it up, and poked around the hard disk. We found a directory with some files in it, one of which was named finger.com or exe. Upon running it a rather well drawn nude woman (line art) was rendered to screen in a revealing position. Then, a series of "frames" were rendered showing the woman fingering herself.

It was beyond crude and incredibly slow to draw each frame, something like 5 seconds each. the previous frames were not erased so there were numerous arms over lapping the original frame. I dont think we even watched the whole thing as it was taking minutes to render and we were worried his parents would see. At that point gif porn was already a thing and we were trading in school on 3.5's.

(I was later given the 6300 which I took apart as I didn't think it was worth anything back then...)

Before this, there was line printer art; see "The IBM 1401 mainframe runs 'Edith'": https://youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg

The Acorn Archimedes [1] in 1987 was a 32bit 8Mhz machine. It had "just about" enough power to decode a jpeg "in software" when the format came out ('93 according to the article). I can remember the few jpegs that were around took a few seconds to render "line by line".

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes

In Europe, disk swapping via snail mail was very popular in late 1980s and early 1990s, back when available bbs/dialup connections were effectively slower than mailing a few floppies. I still remember that for every floppy packed with some coding attempts or demoscene stuff there would be at least 2 packed with low-res erotica. Good times!

It feels they are trying to extrapolate history, and I feel they are using modern tools to create those sample photos, rather than just, y'know, check history :). Strip Poker was played on CGA displays, and it was released in very early 80's. As a normal curious pre-teen at the time, I can personally vouch that Commodore 64 and Sinclair Spectrum ZX 48k had equivalent software available 0:-).

In 1993-1994, BBSes started carrying GRASP and FLICK animation files. Bsically CGA, often 16-color grayscale (laptops and luggables were still mostly monochrome/grayscale) and loops a few seconds long. GIFs were around but always stills, rarely animated because JPEG was just beginning to proliferate.

I'm always surprised I don't see more pervs reminiscing about these, but maybe I'm just an edge case (pun intended).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Animation_System_for_...

Some SFW(!) GRASP and FLICK examples on this Web1.0 page, but the GRASPRT.EXE in the juggler.zip is 16-bit and is looking like a journey to get running itself.

http://www.juggling.org/animations/old.html

I made a game for the Altair 8800! It fit in 128 bytes of RAM and had a one-key control. I called it 'Fly'. An X moved up from the bottom of the screen, you hit the space bar and it's direction changed 45 degrees to the left. You tried to keep it from going off the screen.

That was it. What do you expect in 128 bytes of RAM?

I had ASCII nudes that you had to print out to see. This was all on dot matrix printers with "continuous" paper feed.

So you could print out "long" pictures.

Nowhere near enough lines at the terminal.

The character set was also extremely limited.

You had to view it from a bit of a distance.

Of course it was possible.

For all of y'all mentioning Leisure Suit Larry, that wasn't really porn (more of a raunchy sex comedy) as there wasn't even uncensored nudity, and it was mostly a cartoon. The close-up images of women were more akin to Patrick Nagel paintings (albeit in nasty EGA colors).

But some kid left video porn on one of the classroom computers when I was in high school. It was grainy and choppy, but yeah, you could see she had it way deep in her mouth. Stuff like this was advertised all the time in the way, way back of PC Magazine. The editorship was even discussing banning it in the early 90s.

Joining my voice to those pointing out that the article missed all the display technology already available during the 1970's.

I would bet someone at Xerox and similar research institues playing with osciloscopes also had a go at it.

One thing that younger readers may miss about early retro PCs is just how big and bulky and heavy "Personal" Computers were. In particular even through the late 90s monitors were very boxy (using CRTs, like TVs before them). So access to a computer was typically in a common space, like a computer lab on a university campus, or, later, in a family living room or classroom.

This in contrast with later PC users, who might have grown up with one in a bedroom, or early feature phone users, who would have been able to look at their phones under the covers in bed.

I remember my scientist uncle showing me round the UK's National Physical Laboratory in the summer of 1979, aged 13. At one point, to amuse me, he printed out a dot-matrix picture of a scantily clad woman, which seemed to be a familiar image to the (all-male) scientists in the room. It may have been Lenna [1, referenced in TFA], I don't know. But it was undoubtedly the first digital smut I ever saw.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

Pre-internet, before I had access to a modem at all, we had a disc or two of interesting bits for the old BBC machines. A few full screen bitmaps (displayed using a custom program on the disk using the machine's "mode 0" (640x256 black & white) IIRC), I think using some form of RLE compression to fit more on a disk without taxing the 6502 too much, some were dithered photo scans and some looked drawn. There were also ASCII-art files (mostly too big on-screen without scrolling but could easily be printed).

This isn't really the same thing, but in art form, a company called "American Multiple Industries" published pornographic Atari 2600 games in the early 80's. The most infamous of which was Custer's Revenge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer%27s_Revenge (Possibly NSFW)

Its interesting that there is no mention of interlaced image formats in the article. Interlacing allowed you to see a gradually filled-in image on slow dial up links.

I have a feeling that nudes were the reason it was invented.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlacing_(bitmaps)

Of course I had strip poker on my c64, it was the bomb to a 7 year old mind.

It was certainly possible to do nude photos in the 1960s and 1970s, with a bit of work.

Pictures converted to ASCII and then printed out over multiple sheets of dot-matrix fanfold paper could be taped together and then you would have a poster of your photo.

I never saw this done for nudes, but I did see it done with a Star Trek photo. People were more pure back in those days.

My college roommate was still using a PC/XT in the WWW era. He used NCSA Telnet for DOS and its alternate graphics terminal, a Tektronix 4014 emulator, to browse the web, usenet, gopher, and FTP sites. Images displayed perfectly well on his primitive machine, although they were being decoded by a distant DEC AlphaServer running VMS.

When I was a kid I had a 286 with VGA. However the monitor I had was black and white (64 shades of gray). It required to run a special program to map colors to shades of gray correctly. But the photos looked fantastic - in black and white of course. Much better than in 256 colors. Plus nudes in b&w look more "artistic" ;)

Slightly related: people still use CRTs for high quality viewing of 16x16 booty instead of 4K booty.

https://reddit.com/r/crtgaming/comments/rwq466/crt_master_ra...

Anecdata: We had pamela anderson bitmaps on HP48G series.

I remember 9 year old Ryan discovering fservs on IRC in 1994 or 1995 and having his mind blown at downloading some random image file and it turning out to be a nude woman and being both horrified and mildly curious (but not sexually interested, yet). The quality was crap, and continued to be so for the next several years as I revisited this as a teen with some regularity.

Oddly, I think the Lenna example images, as nudity, in the article on vintage hardware may have actually held my interest more than the stuff did well into 1998 or 1999. Actually, the Lenna and other PG/PG-13 images in those technical styles may have interested me more than the nude images of better quality.

Documentary about the Lenna image:

https://www.facebook.com/codelikeagirlau/videos/985614161797...

> BWWWWBWWWW can be saved as 1B3W1B4W

I've never understood, in explanations of run length encoding, why they always default to putting counts before literals. Isn't it sensible to know what a thing is before knowing how much of it there is?

Count-first also tends to waste encoding space, since it's not clear what a code ending on a count should mean. Literal-first makes it more intuitive to make the code bijective (all codes corresponding to exactly one decoding), and why wouldn't you want to?

Back in the day, you didn't have to be a hacker genius to figure out that if you swapped Suzi5.pic with Suzi1.pic, then she would start the round of strip poker undressed.

Seeing as you could use a 1959 IBM 1401 to print out nude pin-ups ( http://www.threedee.com/jcm/aaa/ ) and subsequent examples ( https://asciipr0n.com/ ) - the answer is an unqualified yes.

Also: http://girls.c64.org

My father brought home the pictured Compaq portable computer back in the 80s. It's what started my fascination computers and ultimately 25+ year career in tech.

In 1984 MacPaint images were spread on CompUServe and BBSes. Someone made a ReadMac program for the MS-DOS machines using CGA to scroll the picture in black and white using 640x200 monochrome mode.

https://www.pcorner.com/list/C/CREADMAC.ZIP/INFO/

I don't remember what year it was, but a friend of mine's dad had a bootleg NES cartridge with dirty images on it.

In 1983, on Apple ][+ machines, I can confirm that I definitely saw R-rated pictures of women on monochrome screens via unapproved software running on our computers at the high school I was attending.

But we were more likely to get kicked out of the computer lab for playing unauthorized computer games than for porn. We were a weird bunch of kids.

there's another technique: define your own charset (a mapping of a char to a 8x8 pixel grid) and then render your image as an ascii screen in this charset. This technique was used often on C64. It's also easy to do animations as the charset can be switched instantly. It does require a lot of preprocessing though.

About the oldest I can recall is ASCII art printer nudies.

At 132 columns of text on 17" wide fanfeed stock, decent-ish resolution is possible especially considering the vertical resolution is unlimited.

This is long enough ago that printing one of those off in a school or corporate setting would earn you a finger wagging at worst.

I vaguely remember going through a bunch of 5 1/4 floppies my dad had with our IBM PCjr and finding porn on them. That was the only computer we had with that kind of drive. Yeah you needed to go through two layers of DOS boot disks to get at em but there was nude lady pics.

I was in highschool in the late 1980's, and clearly remember "CGA porn". Often 640x200 mono images that automatically scrolled/panned. But also "animated" images comprised of just a handful of frames.

Of course PC porn totally exploded once VGA was released.

Ugh, the 256 color VGA Lenna has horrible palette selection, most probably none at all (using the default palette). That picture could look so much better!

It seems like one of these things, where what used to be reasonably common technical knowledge has now largely been lost.

I distinctly remember a video game series from then 90s that was based around this concept called Leisure Suit Larry. I can neither confirm nor deny playing any such game, but I can confirm it was possible to display nude pictures.

It's a bit mind-blowing to current computer users that back then we needed to exit the terminal emulator and then run a program to see what a GIF image looked like.

There were entire BBS areas devoted to porn before GIF or JPEG were even invented.

No mention of Sam fox strip poker on the zx spectrum in 1986. By the time 16 machines came along and disk swapping was common things became quite convincing. High chance of getting a virus that way though.

Those of us doing support in student computer labs at the time regularly would walk into the rooms in the morning and be greeted with all green screens displaying x-rated animated ASCII art

Ahh decoding atari strip poker images was fun for me as a teenager. Turned out to be xor with a number increasing by one for each pixel.

Wait until you find out all the efforts us Generation X olds put into watching scrambled porn channels on cable TV…

Not really nude pictures - but I remember playing "Leisure Suit Larry" on MS-DOS as a kid.

yes, it is still a thing.

While not a NSFW, it goes like this:

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 MMMMMMMMMHMMHHHI'  '::I HMMMMMI
 MMMHMMMMMMMMMMHHI, '   HIHMMMMMM.
 MMMMMMMMMMMMMMIII,     '':IHMMMM
 MMMMMMMMMHMMMMMMH:      ... HMMM:
 MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMHHH        IMM MH,
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 MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM'H:MHIII:...:  ':.:.
 MMMMMHHMMHHMHI ,,MMMII:'::I:I.  :I::
 MMMMMMMMHH....:'''''::.::I,.: MII:
 MMMMMMMMM::.::'''   '':::IH:IM:: IM.
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*LINE DISCONNECTED*

When I was 10 I had floppy disks with short porn loops. CGA display adapter, 8086 machine.

I'm pretty sure everyone who bought Leisure Suit Larry thought it was possible.

I thought doing this on my HP 48G was low-tech, but these really take the cake.

In the old days, using technology to watch porn was fun. Nowadays, with VR devices locked down and controlled by their vendors, not so much ...

Yes (DOS 6, cpu Intel 8088).

what a ridiculous question.

Strip Poker 1982 on (NSFW I guess) -

https://www.mobygames.com/game/strip-poker-a-sizzling-game-o...

On the C64 we worked out to just rename the pics (last as first so you start naked)

Can't remember if it took us using the Action Replay or not.

Having 2 pictures super high res on PC was a big thing in the early 90's (for school kids)

I'd love to see them now... In my mind they were 4k...

Not to any hires degree, which is why engineers developed the hardware and software we have today.

Ahh Lenna - the Henrietta Lacks of image processing algorithms.

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