The first thing I ever saw that resembled digital pornography of any kind was a Commodore 64 program. It was a grainy “picture” of a topless woman that slowly revealed itself from the bottom up to the tune of the Entertainer. That was probably in 1987 and so I didn't quite understand the implications of what I was seeing. It was one of many (probably pirated) programs my father got from the proto-neckbeard that fixed our Commodore. He fixed it like by replacing components and soldering shit. You used to be able to do that with computers…

By the time I was in junior high school, there were tidbits of porn going around but it was all scans of hairy 70s/80s pornography and not good scans either. Scanners were rare things. A lot of computers didn’t really do color well enough for porn, so there wasn’t much point anyway.

If you wanted video the only way to get it was on tape. In Junior High and early in High School we had something of an operation going on where we taped stuff off of Showtime and later off of actual real porn videos stolen from our parents. This was a lucrative line of work for a thirteen year-old second only to selling weed, really. We raked in the Lincolns, expanded our collection of twice-copied “master tapes”, and built a vast empire of smut. We had people who found master tapes, workers to copy tapes, pushers, and everything. Oh, and we used the boy scouts to lend an air of legitimacy to our operation too. It was as professional as you can get for that age.

The Internet totally ruined our game, by the way. It all collapsed sophomore year or so. By this point there were better connections to the Internet, rich kids got CD burners, and the flood of porn began in earnest. It put us out of work. We had to get real jobs. Well, real jobs for fifteen year-olds, so shitty jobs where we actually had to do stuff for low wages.

I’m sure there’s some parallel to the war on drugs in here somewhere…

0037 ca. 1994
Artist's Depiction
Date: Five minutes after finding the first result on Google image search
Medium: Worst photoshop ever
Dimensions: I'm not even going to bother looking
Current Location: This piece of shit web site