ASCII porn predates the Internet but it's still everywhere (2019) | Hacker News Reader

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

vice.com

185 pointsBluestein91 comments

The French minitel in mid-80s was successful also thanks to online porn. It was not using the internet (not TCP-IP network), but it was pushing the ASCII art to its limits :)

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-10-24-mn-718-st...

and it made some people rich https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/le-monde-t...

I remember there were ads everywhere for stuff like 3615 ULLA, magazine, billboards, any walls etc. Crazy time.

A TV show revolving around this exact period titled « 3615 Monique » (« Cheeky Business » in English) was released in 2020. A kind of french « Social Network » in some way, pretty cool

I understand why, but still feel it's a missed opportunity, for them to have not referenced libcaca/aalib in the "for more information" sections.

https://aa-project.sourceforge.net/aalib/

http://caca.zoy.org/wiki/libcaca

I don't understand why. One has a name that includes "poop" in Spanish, is that why? Vice usually doesn't shy away from things so not sure why they'd do it here.

Thanks for sharing them here at least.

I wish the article mentioned Computer Nude (1967) by Ken Knowlton. It isn't ASCII, but it is a text mosaic. It was widely circulated at the time, was the first full frontal nude printed in The New York Times, and was somewhat important in the development of computer graphics.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/technology/ken-knowlton-d...

https://archive.is/6RHVb

Due to the effective destruction of the printer ribbon and consequently effects on printer life cycle, printing the overstrike art was banned at my uni in 1979. The ops had one of the multi sheet 132 column nude printouts on the wall for a while but after complaints it was removed.

(Tops 10, chain printer)

These are nudes, not porn.

Is "The Birth of Venus" by Botticelli also porn?

American culture is very prudish, courtesy of its Puritanical roots which even today cause us to label a woman sucking off an enormous penis (like in "Deep ASCII", referenced in article) as so-called "pornography".

Yeah, but blowing up people on TV shows, with blood and body parts going everywhere is perfectly alright.

That is the thing with censorship, it isn't consequent.

Different cultures each have their own standards for what is and is not considered offensive, and each culture thinks that its standards are correct. That isn't hypocrisy, it's just how this whole topic works. There are no two human cultures in history which have entirely agreed on what is and isn't offensive, so why do people feel the need to pick on Americans specifically? It strikes me as extremely narrow-minded.

Because Americans love to push their standards on the rest of the world, specially American companies with high control of Internet contents.

Then again, the current geopolitic clima has proven the time we are supposed to be all friends across the technology field, is coming to an end, and every nation is better off putting effort in ramping up with own siloed technology with less dependency in foreign nations.

> so why do people feel the need to pick on Americans specifically

Who is the main exporter of entertainment in the world?

90% of Europe doesn't care about America's prudeness. We see you as socially outdated and far from what you are trying to show us from Hollywood.

I'm from Europe. Whether it is seen socially outdated or not is orthogonal to the fact that US is the main exporter.

Just go through your cinema/streaming service and count how many of the movies/shows/music are from US.

Including porn, which is kind of ironic given the puritanical nature being discussed, and not being consequential.

> but blowing up people on TV shows, with blood and body parts going everywhere is perfectly alright.

Don't worry, it is becoming "not alright" already. Completely sanitized movies where people are being thrown like a ragdoll, land on asphalt face down and then walk it off like they were slapped by a baby.

The sanitization is for commercial considerations. Getting a PG13 rating maximizes number of box office ticket buyers, so no blood after stabbings, no gore, and a maximum of one swear word.

You mean, like Tom and Jerry or Coyote and Road Runner?

Yeah, except with real humans.

Where in the world is a clip of a woman "sucking off an enormous penis" not considered pornography? I'm European and I can't really believe that

I think you're missing the heavy sarcasm there

Then what is the point, that Americans aren't really prudish at all and that other people are silly for saying that certain things aren't porn? If it's sarcasm I don't really get the point it's trying to portray

Nudes are not always porn, but that doesn't mean they can't be porn either. Ultimately I would say it comes down to whether the intent is to titillate, but of course porn is notoriously hard to define.

"I'll know it when I see it [on a terminal]" :)

I would say that if there's no depiction of a sexual act, or any gestures or body poses suggesting an invitation to a sexual act, it's not pornography. While I can't necessarily pinpoint where the threshold lies, without certain ingredients like these, it's far from it.

Not in Italy.

Back in the days I used to help (for free, I was ~13 and nobody asked) moderating a big free-hosting Italian service.

It had a pretty smart business model: hosting was free, but any ads the webmaster wanted to show had to come from the hosting provider and the ad revenue would be shared between the webmaster and the hosting provider.

One of the terms of service was no porn. As you can imagine one of the webmasters made this very successful website, with ads, showing pictures of women and a lot of people thought it was indeed porn.

When the hosting provider closed his account the webmaster brought in lawyers to dispute his ban, and just like that we discovered that in Italy the rule is (ish) that there needs to be penetration to qualify, so the ban had to be reverted.

Do you think no one has ever wanked to Michelangelo's "David"?

Everything would be porn by that definition.

Oh, word has it that was pretty much just you.

But about a third of HN has wanked to John McCarthy's metacircular implementation of Lisp in Lisp, so that is porn.

And, look, he basically even admitted it in History of Lisp, in a paragraph directly referencing the implementation of the above interpreter:

"The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the form of the language, and some of the decisions made rather lightheartedly for the “Recursive functions ...” paper later proved unfortunate. These included the COND notation for conditional expressions which leads to an unnecessary depth of parentheses, and the use of the number zero to denote the empty list NIL and the truth value false. Besides encouraging pornographic programming, giving a special interpretation to the address 0 has caused difficulties in all subsequent implementations."

It was pornographic programming, as admitted by the author, and hackers wank to it in a circle to this day. Open and shut case, pretty much.

Spaniard here. No, and neither is porn the tons of nude women in pictures from the Middle Ages or the Enlightenment. They look dull.

Did you actually scroll past the header? There's a ASCII gif of a blowjob

Back in the day, I've actually seen ASCII images and animations that would qualify as porn cartoons, so I don't have to survey the presently referenced materials in detail. The majority that are just naked women in a standing pose showing bush and boobs are not porn.

Being naked isn't porn.

Otherwise we would ask, "where were you porn" rather than "where were you born".

You said:

> These are nudes, not porn.

I said:

There's definitely porn on that article. There's nothing else to add, because there's definitely porn on that article.

    ( .Y. )

8->+o

Dutch viditel had porn; stories with 'graphics' and BBSs I used had also porn stories with ascii art. It was what I could get with a 300 baud modem. At 9600 baud, I could download grainy msx 2 porn images finally. There were even 'movies' (usually 2 images swapping over)!

I actuallly prefer this over the stuff they have now. It’s part art, part sleaze

Then you would have loved the HyperCard Smut Stack, the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released!

I've begged Chuck to dig around to see if he has an old copy of the floppy lying around and upload it, but so far I don't know of a copy online you can run. Its bold pioneering balance of art and slease deserves preservation, and the story behind it is hilarious.

Edit: OMG I've just found the Geraldo episode with Chuck online, auspiciously titled "Geraldo: Sex in the 90's. From Computer Porn to Fax Foxes", which shows an example of Smut Stack:

https://visual-icon.com/lionsgate/detail/?id=67563&t=ts

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22285675

DonHopkins on Feb 10, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: HyperCard: What Could Have Been (2002)

Do you have the first commercial HyperCard stack ever released: the HyperCard SmutStack? Or SmutStack II, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, both by Chuck Farnham? SmutStack was the first commercial HyperCard product available at rollout, released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo, cost $15, and made a lot of money (according to Chuck). SmutStack 2, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, had every type of sexual adventure you could imagine in it, including information about gays, lesbians, transgendered, HIV, safer sex, etc. Chuck was also the marketing guy for Mac Playmate, which got him on Geraldo, and sued by Playboy.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/could-the-ios-app-be-the-21st-...

>Smut Stack. One of the first commercial stacks available at the launch of HyperCard was Smut Stack, a hilarious collection (if you were in sixth grade) of somewhat naughty images that would make joke, present a popup image, or a fart sound when the viewer clicked on them. The author was Chuck Farnham of Chuck's Weird World fame.

>How did he do it? After all, HyperCard was a major secret down at Cupertino, even at that time before the wall of silence went up around Apple.

>It seems that Farnham was walking around the San Jose flea market in the spring of 1987 and spotted a couple of used Macs for sale. He was told that they were broken. Carting them home, he got them running and discovered several early builds of HyperCard as well as its programming environment. Fooling around with the program, he was able to build the Smut Stack, which sold out at the Boston Macworld Expo, being one of the only commercial stacks available at the show.

https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990/MacWorl...

Page 69 of https://archive.org/stream/MacWorld_9008_August_1990

>Famham's Choice

>This staunch defender was none other than Chuck Farnham, whom readers of this column will remember as the self-appointed gadfly known for rooting around in Apple’s trash cans. One of Farnham ’s myriad enterprises is Digital Deviations, whose products include the infamous SmutStack, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, and the multiple-disk set Sounds of Susan. The last comes in two versions: a $15 disk of generic sex noises and, for $10 more, a personalized version in which the talented Susan moans and groans using your name. I am not making this up.

>Farnham is frank about his participation in the Macintosh smut trade. “The problem with porno is generic,” he says, sounding for the briefest moment like Oliver Wendell Holmes. “When you do it, you have to make a commitment ... say you did it and say it’s yours. Most people would not stand up in front of God and country and say, ‘It’s mine.’ I don’t mind being called Mr. Scum Bag.”

>On the other hand, he admits cheerily, “There’s a huge market for sex stuff.” This despite the lack of true eroticism. “It’s a novelty,” says Farnham. Sort of the software equivalent of those ballpoint pens with the picture of a woman with a disappearing bikini.

https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110/NewComputer...

Page 18 of https://archive.org/stream/NewComputerExpress110

>“Chuck developed the first commercial stack, the Smutstack, which was released two weeks before HyperCard went public at a MacWorld Expo. He’s embarrassed how much money a silly collection of sounds, cartoons, and scans of naked women brought in. His later version, the Carnal Knowledge Navigator, was also a hit.

That Geraldo episode has me rolling, thanks for the share.

I love the way Chuck holds his smirk throughout the entire interview. And Geraldo's reply to his comment:

"I was a fulfillment house for orders."

"That sounds sexual in itself! What was a fulfilment house?"

Epic comment! Thanks for rhist

It's funny. Some of the physical wall art I collect has a similar character of walking the line of tacky, like a psychopathic 16-year-old bully's pin-up spank fodder from the '80s, to exuding inherent value independent of sexuality. It goes between the authentic Soviet propaganda posters and the defunct radio station stickers signed by Frank Zappa.

There's an old LCM (Living Computer Museum, RIP) video where they run off a card deck of a risque ASCII art program on an IBM mainframe's line printer. It feigns a printer fault after printing the subject down to the shoulders, only to finish the print suddenly (line printers are fast!) when the operator has gone over to the printer. IIRC the original livestream was unprepared for that :P

Wonder if ASCII porn is a viable OnlyFans niche

Time to put on my robes and wizard hat.

Here, let me answer that for you:

No.

I wouldn't underestimate it

I remember finding ASCII porn online as a kid in the late 90’s and finding it the most hilarious thing I’d ever seen in my 11 years on the planet.

Honestly, I’d never really thought about it again until reading this. It actually gave me a good appreciation for it. There’s a pretty insane amount of detail in it. Quite the commitment.

Predates the web but not the internet.

Literally from the article, emphasis is mine:

> 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.

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

What point are you trying to make? Arpanet is not the internet and the internet is not Arpanet.

The claim wasn't that it predates any wide area network. It was that it predates the Internet, a specific well known wide area network.

Your lack of understanding of the history of the internet is really not any of my business nor concern.

Not saying goto80 is wrong, but I'd like to know what his research found and why he's qualifying it with "probably".

Teletext is still used in several countries.

Also, I have seen ascii art on telex-type machines. These are limited by using only five bits, and so you can only use lowercase characters (or uppercase, but not both).

There are some examples here: http://artscene.textfiles.com/rtty/RTTYCOM/

Predates the internet, just like me. My mom was a high school math teacher, and was taking a COBOL class for her Masters at Hofstra University in 1977. I’m certain it was ‘77 because the Commodore PET had just released and she had one on home-loan that summer. One of my earliest memories is visiting the mainframe room, probably age 6-7, where the bearded sysadmin used a teletypewriter to print me a giant ascii art picture of Snoopy, standing in profile, on a green and white striped, tractor-fed paper. I’m sure the sysadmin had other interesting ascii art that was not appropriate to share with 7 year old.

Old man story over, but holy F, Hofstra is still teaching COBOL, wow?

https://www.hofstra.edu/academics/ce/professionaldevelopment...

At my location certainly predates the internet, it was distributed on magnetic tapes.

ARPANET was established in 1969. In 1966 Ken Knowles at Bell Labs created the "Computer Nude" which "by scanning a photograph with a camera and converting the analog voltages to binary numbers, which were assigned typographic symbols based on halftone densities. It was printed in The New York Times on October 11, 1967". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Knowlton

I wonder if ASCII art could be improved by UNICODE art due to many more shapes available.

> "People seem to assume any ASCII art is up for grabs, for free. But it is art, like any other image photographed, painted, etc."

...and my personal take is the opposite - it's the other types of art that should be as distributable as ASCII

artists should be payed for creation, not for access to the works - that's how commissions work, and that's why AI pictures prospered

and problem of "reselling of someone else's art" isn't in "re", but in "selling" as a whole

> artists should be payed for creation, not for access to the works - that's how commissions work, and that's why AI pictures prospered

Looking through 1929s art that just entered public domain now in 2025, that's something that surprised me, how much of that stuff was commissioned by some wealthy individual who paid up front. Lots of popular stuff was created that way it seems, while I don't think that's nearly as popular to do today.

I remember printing this stuff out as a teenager because I thought it was funny... And getting in trouble for it.

EBCDIC porn really punched my cards. ;)

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.

Really brings to mind that thought about "tech being driven by porn as a first use case" ...

... rule 34.5? :)

found new banners for my servers

It's kind of funny that every example the article shows is a screenshot or video. Not a single one was actual ASCII text in the HTML...

DRM

It's not trivial to display ASCII art as text in html. There's so many ways to mess it up that unless the site is dedicated to ASCII art, a simple image is really preferable.

<pre> works pretty reliably

For whitespace and for the simplest ASCII sure, but for anything a bit more complex you might have problems with

1. HTML reserved characters like < > and \.

2. overflowing content

3. displaying ASCII made with special encodings and characters sets, like code page 437

4. displaying nonprintable (control) characters

5. displaying colors

6. text preprocessors messing up the formatting

the Virtual terminal[1] from Asciinema[2] is what I use but that is a lot more difficult than just including a video of it. I got CMS from a very expensive CMS to support Asciinema but it was actually too much effort to be worth it I had to recompile some components make a editor interface etc etc.

[1]https://github.com/asciinema/avt

[2]https://docs.asciinema.org/how-it-works/

check out my website:

https://terminoid.com/discover/

i still need to add seeking and stuff, but it works. like asciinema but based on xterm.js

Most of those are solved with wrapping it in both <code> and <pre>, and #5 I don't think is even part of "ASCII art" anymore as it wouldn't be just ASCII anymore, but rich-text.

What do you mean? Add far as I know <code><pre> doesn't help with any of those?

Color is very much a part of ASCII art, if we consider ASCII to mean a broader range of different technologies. Just check the stuff in the article, or the stuff on https://16colo.rs/ site.

Aaah. None of these fancier ones were loading for me earlier for some reason, all I got was the clearly-mono-spaced one in the header.

Yeah, for non-ASCII / more sophisticated stuff, images are kinda the only widely-compatible option without adopting a full terminal emulator worth of javascript.

None of these points seem to be relevant when it comes to the question about ASCII art as text in html vs image. Most of them feel to be no actual problems at all, but only someone vaguely mentioned some keywords in order to 'find' problems?

Pre differs browser to browser

Sure, they might not be pixel-perfect, but if you're doing ASCII art you aren't really aiming for pixel-perfectness anyways, then you'd chose a different medium. It's inherently a medium for the clients to render how they see fit.

Can you tell about some?

Check my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42572483

4chan's /jp/ has [sjis] bbcode tags for formatting ASCII art consistently with the Mona typeface.

No thread up though, and the archive doesn't support the tags.

How is that non trivial? You just need to use a monospace font and control for width

You also need to preprocess the text to deal with HTML reserved characters like <

Getting an individual piece of ASCII art to work is often possible reasonably quickly, but the more examples you want to include the more odd edge cases you find.

They should make a dating app out of that.

Well ... CNN says dating apps are changing ...

... maybe not that much :)

too bad, I guess, :P

ASCII Porn doesn't just sound, sorry, look like less is more. It literally translates into so much more than it actually is.

Dick pics like 8=====D would be on the honor system.

It reminds me of sooo many things. Maybe it's part of a kitchen tool. Or gardening, a weapon, you name it. But by no means it looks like a dick. :-/

I have literally never seen ASCII porn, and I've been on the net since 1994.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com