ASCII Porn doesn't just sound, sorry, look like less is more. It literally translates into so much more than it actually is.
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)
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.
> 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://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'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
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.
Old man story over, but holy F, Hofstra is still teaching COBOL, wow?
https://www.hofstra.edu/academics/ce/professionaldevelopment...
...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
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/technology/ken-knowlton-d...
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.
(Tops 10, chain printer)
That is the thing with censorship, it isn't consequent.
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.
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
... rule 34.5? :)
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.
https://terminoid.com/discover/
i still need to add seeking and stuff, but it works. like asciinema but based on xterm.js
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.
No thread up though, and the archive doesn't support the tags.
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.
Thanks for sharing them here at least.
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.
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/
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.
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.
Who is the main exporter of entertainment in the world?
Just go through your cinema/streaming service and count how many of the movies/shows/music are from US.
"I was a fulfillment house for orders."
"That sounds sexual in itself! What was a fulfilment house?"
Being naked isn't porn.
Otherwise we would ask, "where were you porn" rather than "where were you born".
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.
Yeah, for non-ASCII / more sophisticated stuff, images are kinda the only widely-compatible option without adopting a full terminal emulator worth of javascript.
> 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.