At 17:03 12/01/03, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
Despite having lived through much recent history, I've forgotten a lot of
it....
I just wonder: does anyone know/remember when the first Web porn site came
online?
Wondering whether it was before or after the first official release of
Mosaic....
Obviously depends on what you mean "on-line".
1. as Dave said there were sex oriented "areas" on many computers.
2. I suppose the first commercial sex sites were on Minitel.
3. This means that technically they were on-line from the Internet legal
perspective when it interconnected the public nets (84). Actually a few
Internet private gateways existed before and some Intelmatics tests were
probably carried in the USA as early as 1982, with protocol conversion. I
would be surprised that no one test connected them from ARPANET. When
people tested from abroad, I do not know why, they always did it with a
porn site.
4.UK Universities also shared into Prestel and some where on the Internet
(you should inquire there. They had a leading data brokering firm that
"on-line", I Oxford (?) I think). I do not know about Paris University, but
we can investigate.
jfc