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.
There are sex-themed text adventures (e.g. Drive-In in which you're at a Drive-in movie theatre with a date: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=gksf13iptntcx5m6 ) but most of the people writing "amateur literotica" are middle-aged women and the pre-VGA era PC has far fewer of those proportionally.
In terms of more conventional erotic literature (not branching narrative) that takes off more with widespread access to the Internet because it connects writers and audience. Today authors can gently shade over, from giving away fan-fiction on AO3 to producing cheap Amazon e-Books that make you enough to buy a coffee once in a while, to getting paid professionally to churn out stories for an outfit like Harlequin that can afford actual editors (even if you read two Romances a day like my mother, the fact Jim got taller and grew a beard in the course of a single chapter jumps out, not to mention the fact his older brother's name changed, and so she can tell if she's reading a story that a professional gave the once over before it was published). The Internet also caused readers to explore more, instead of buying a box of a dozen Edwardian-era Romantic fiction novels at a time, knowing that's more of something you like, when it's one click away why not find out whether you're into werewolves, or gay relationships, or the Wild West, or whatever? If you hate it you can click away and be reading yet more stories from the early 20th century British Empire in seconds.
Intentional or not, WAP (Wiresless Application Protocol) was a real protocol that allowed you to surf the web on a cellphone in the late 90s/early 20s, before 3G was a thing. Most websites (or wapsites) were super barebones and relatively fast for me, and you could find interesting stuff like cracked .jars of popular games or of course, porn. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
They had to be barebones. WAP only supported text and tiny black and white (no greyscale) images. I did some WAP sites and it was pretty horrible to work with even back then. The phone I used (Nokia 7110) didn't even support GPRS so you had to make a call at 9600 baud and pay per minute so you didn't want to hang around either.
The Japanese had i.mode which was much more powerful. They tried to introduce it in Europe but by then the smartphone was already coming.
Why are people using euphemisms here? The sexual reference: WAP stands for "wet ass pussy", popularized by Cardi B: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsm4poTWjMs. The music video has over 400M views.
The term (as a word, not an acronym) is also used to refer to self-indulgence, generally among males. That and earlier references suggesting various modes of beat being laid down are what I was referencing with my etymology link above.
"Fap" began as onomatopoeia popularized by the Sexy Losers webcomic, first appearing in https://www.sexylosers.com/comic/003/ (NSFW in case that wasn't obvious).
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.
Ah, this brings back memories of a friend getting hold of some pixelated gifs and bringing them in on a 3.5" floppy, the anticipation as we copied them over in the lab, then the mixed excitement and disappointment on trying to load them up at home and finding out half of the files were corrupted, followed by in-hindsight-amusing panic on the discovery of the Recent Documents list. :D
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
Sexuality is one of the biggest internal and external influencer on everything we do in life. Work, pleasure, friends and also technology. Sex is what identifies us. Yet, in de west, specially in the US people find it very difficult to talk about it. Some groups (religious or not) even deliberately try to cover everything up resulting in perverse behaviour which unfortunately is also very high in the US.
I don't know much about the culture specifically, but I'm reminded of the story about the Indonesian president whom the KGB tried to blackmail by taping him being seduced by two flight attendants.
> Before starting the blackmail, KGB invited Sukarno in a small private movie theatre and showed him the pornographic video, in which he was playing the main part. KGB agents were expecting him to get really frightened, that he would agree to cooperate with them at once, but everything happened vice versa: Sukarno fondly decided that it was a gift from the Soviet government, so he asked for more copies to take them back to Indonesia and show them in movie theatres. Sukarno said to flabbergasted agents that the people of Indonesia would be very proud of him, if they could see him doing the nasty with Russian girls.
porn is at the front of technological advancement. Was doing reverse billed SMS payment systems for mobile content early 2000s, and our biggest customers were porn sites.
In 1994, the New York Times published a story with one of its more vivid titles which has stuck in my head ever since: "Porn, the Low-Slung Engine of Progress" [0]. It makes the point that at many key moments of technological development throughout history, porn has driven adoption of new tech. Expensive VCR sales (and perhaps apocryphally, VHS winning over Beta due to Sony shunning porn) was driven by porn availability. Bulletin Board Systems, chat rooms, CD-ROMs, etc. all had pornographic elements, even if it was just stories or text chat.
The referenced article in this thread mentions some of the history of the Lena image, but Wired did a good job finding the actual woman in question and talking about some of the social history. [1]
I was never on the Well, Fidonet, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy or any other BBS systems, but from this article [2] you can see that low-res text-based block character "images" were possible. The minute you can make something display an image, someone is going to figure out how to put porn on it.
Apparently there was MacPlaymate, a 1-bit image depth interactive program (distributed on 3.5" floppies) from 1986. NSFW [3]
Usenet was definitely part of the early mass sharing of porn online, but as far as I can tell image binaries date (e.g. alt.sex.pictures.erotica.* or alt.sex.binaries.*) more to early 1990s, not 80s. Downloading low-res images over a 14.4 modem in multiple UUencoded text messages based only on a title (or perhaps a frequent, trusted poster) and re-constructing them into a GIF or JPG was very very slow, but where there's a will there's a way - or so I'm told...
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.
On the c64 too, along with assorted other games with nudity ranging from crudely drawn images to scans. And one of the first things the improved graphics of the Amiga was used for was whole series of floppies with scanned nude images.
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.
I remember trading erotic GIF images was popular on the computers in high school (around '92). I got a floppy of some to watch at home on my Amiga 500, and got hold of a program that could view 256-colour GIFs in HAM mode. It took about a minute to render each image.
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.
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.
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)
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!
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?
Well that one is more understandable. You can't tell literal from counts except by convention. If we assume ASCII encoding, you don't know if it's a 'B' or a count of 66. It makes sense when you're encoding something with lots of runs, that you use every second word for literals and every second word for counts.
I just don't understand why they start with counts, that's all.
The reason in explanations is clear, it's how people naturally think about it "You have 1 B, then 3 Ws...". People don't say aloud "You have B times 1, then W times 3".
Whenever there are many ways to encode something, there's wasted room in the encoding space :) Not usually a big deal, but when the goal is compression, I think it's nice if it can be avoided.
Regardless of how you do your RLE, you're almost certainly going to have many ways to encode something: you can almost certainly encode a run of four as two runs of two (you wouldn't want to, of course, but you could). It's not an encoder you tend to use if you want to use the absolute smallest amount of space, it's good if your data has enough repeats to get compression and your encoding/decoding systems are very resource constrained.
It makes a nice interview problem because compression is a real problem, but RLE needs almost zero previous knowledge, has many reasonable answers, doesn't have a gotcha solution, and most people haven't done it before. Lots of typically better compression algorithms out there, but I don't think any are suitable for general interview.
Yeah, in a bijective RLE, one needs to take into account that, say, A2A2 can't mean the same as A4.
However, since you also want to be able to represent runs longer than 255 (if you're doing it on byte level), you can solve both problems. If you encounter repeated runs of the same literal, just combine them into a bigger number. So A2A2 should be read as "A times (0b00000010 00000010)" whereas A4 should be read as "A times (0b00000100)."
There are some subtleties still to make it a bijective code, related to end handling and how to represent variable length numbers uniquely, but it's perfectly possible, and once you get it right it isn't really larger than "regular" RLE.
It's an interesting challenge to write bijective encodings. I feel it's a bit like writing quines, you have to keep in mind a thing you usually don't. For quines, "what this does to the text you need to output", for bijective encodings, "what this does for the inverse function". Not saying you should give it as an interview question, though!
Some RLE encodings use negative values for a block of non-repeating data. So in its simple form AAABCD would be encoded as 3A -3BCD . Without negative values this would be encoded as 3A 1B 1C 1D. The .TGA RLE format worked roughly like this. All of this means you need the length before you can look at the next bytes.
> 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.
There were multiple S-100 boards that could do graphics. I remember a BYTE article about one that could join multiple boards to have multiple bits per pixel.
Oh sure, there are a few[1]. I just chose one that was commonly used at the time. What you’re referring to is probably the MicroAngelo[2], which could display monochrome 512x480; however, it could be multiplexed with up to 8 cards to act as a bitplane renderer @ 256 colors.
Exactly. If they were talking about video, you’re gonna have to wait another generation are two for commodity hardware. But just showing an image? The Altair was certainly capable.
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.
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
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".
The JPEG standard came out in September 1992, JView (which became For Your Eyes Only 2) came out in February 1993, and was I think the first jpeg viewer for RISC OS.
The first version of the GIF<->JPEG converter came out in the spring/summer of 1991 (although Wikipedia says in October 1991: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libjpeg). I know this because I built the first version which then got passed to Tom Lane when I changed jobs in July 1991.
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.
I can't find the source right now, but I recall reading somewhere that aside from being a clever marketing gimmick, Nintendo's official seal wasn't just a response to all the "rubbish" games on Atari (which is what then-Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi explicitly stated), but also the high number of them that were sex-themed.
Basically the Atari 2600 didn't have any mechanism to prevent third parties from creating games for the system, and this led to a lot of games that were pornographic in nature.
Nintendo placed a lot of value in their family-friendly image and locked the Famicom/NES down so that to get your cartridges manufactured you had to go through Nintendo's approval process. Nintendo of America was quite notorious for what they didn't allow, going to some Comics Code Authority-levels of censorship.
Here's Angry Video Game Nerd's video about several of the controversial games on the Atari 2600: https://youtu.be/uLOVemRanhw
Back in '82 I wrote a little Vic-20 assembler that would write over the memory used by the font, so I could create tiles for video games. The first test I made was simply a picture of John Belushi from an "Animal House" still. I showed that at the local Commodore store, and they asked to use it for their display computers and asked me to present at their computer club. After the presentation, a few days later, I started to see all manner of nudes being created with my little program by quite a few people.
Pretty much every computer magazine from the mid-late 80s onward had lewd software ads in the back.
Alas, I was too young to cleverly find a way to purchase these without my parents finding out, and was never able to locate a BBS that hosted this type of content.
I remember Quest for Glory 2 from Sierra Games had a sequence where you could purchase X-Ray glasses and you could wear them to see Zayishah, one of the central characters, naked in the game (rather pixelated it must be said).
IIRC Larry didn't get much more than a mildly risque hot tub shot and some heavily censored humping. Didn't it have a black bar that bounced up and down or something like that? It was a comedy game first and porn game a distant second.
Yeah, this article really made me feel old. And I'm only 37.
My first contact with digitized smut happened around 1995 I think, when my friend showed me some porn game with short live-action clips on his Amiga (which is sadly not even mentioned in the article, even though its multimedia – and thus porn – capabilities were from another planet compared to PCs in the early 90s.)
Confirmed, even pre PC micro's as you say could achieve this feat.
I personally did a demo that I slipped onto the local computer stores machine that sat in high memory (reset resistant unless held down for few seconds more than a press) TSR kinda thing upon an Atari ST that had a selection of the finest artwork that would cycle thru the selection after a delay of a few minutes displaying a screen capture of a normal desktop. Few weeks later version two had an animated flying phallus sprite across the screen.
But for a generation that found amusement in 55378008 upon a calculator, then it was inevitable.
And them strip poker games on the C64 and the likes: at least we had to learn and beat the computer at five-cards draw (Texas Hold'Em was that famous yet back then) to see naked women!
This made me distinctly remember a topless Cindy Crawford, but by then I was already on my Amiga 500. That gave the pictures full 4096 color HAM glory though at a time early PC's still largely rocked 16 color displays during roughly the 286 era.
Not full up retro, but I remember one dial up BBS service in my local dialing zone had a 6 disc CD changer and the sixth disk was loaded full of porn. Downloading at 14.4kbps meant getting about 100kb per minute, but since even the high quality stuff was only 640x480 that wasn't so bad.
The big difference on the 8-bit micros is no Internet, so you would have to find someone physically selling the disc, which was very hard to find. Plus digital scanners were extremely expensive professional gear and digital cameras basically didn't exist. Production was seriously bottlenecked. Still, like life, porn finds a way.
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.
The article also misses (I)LBM, interleaved bitmap, which was a de-facto standard image format for games in the late 80s/early 90s. Also the default file format of Deluxe Paint. According to http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/ILBM the first spec was published in 1986.
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.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadThe 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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29734146
I picture is worth a thoughsand words.
In terms of more conventional erotic literature (not branching narrative) that takes off more with widespread access to the Internet because it connects writers and audience. Today authors can gently shade over, from giving away fan-fiction on AO3 to producing cheap Amazon e-Books that make you enough to buy a coffee once in a while, to getting paid professionally to churn out stories for an outfit like Harlequin that can afford actual editors (even if you read two Romances a day like my mother, the fact Jim got taller and grew a beard in the course of a single chapter jumps out, not to mention the fact his older brother's name changed, and so she can tell if she's reading a story that a professional gave the once over before it was published). The Internet also caused readers to explore more, instead of buying a box of a dozen Edwardian-era Romantic fiction novels at a time, knowing that's more of something you like, when it's one click away why not find out whether you're into werewolves, or gay relationships, or the Wild West, or whatever? If you hate it you can click away and be reading yet more stories from the early 20th century British Empire in seconds.
If this was an intentional pun over the recently-acquired other meaning of "WAP", my compliments, it was perfectly executed.
The Japanese had i.mode which was much more powerful. They tried to introduce it in Europe but by then the smartphone was already coming.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/wap
https://xkcd.com/37/
Apparently I've now lost that game.
The term (as a word, not an acronym) is also used to refer to self-indulgence, generally among males. That and earlier references suggesting various modes of beat being laid down are what I was referencing with my etymology link above.
Wonder if that word is where 'fap' comes from (meaning 'to masturbate')
If there is one thing that really educated me about kink, it's that comic
Cool!
You could however send and receive graphical SMS on Nokia 3310 - a whooping 72x28 monochrome image sent over three SMSes :)
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.
Damn you 47 year old brain! Too soon for dementia, behave or I shall poke you with a Q-tip!
It sounds like you have a specific, non-western culture in mind which finds it very easy to talk about about sex.
Which is it?
> Before starting the blackmail, KGB invited Sukarno in a small private movie theatre and showed him the pornographic video, in which he was playing the main part. KGB agents were expecting him to get really frightened, that he would agree to cooperate with them at once, but everything happened vice versa: Sukarno fondly decided that it was a gift from the Soviet government, so he asked for more copies to take them back to Indonesia and show them in movie theatres. Sukarno said to flabbergasted agents that the people of Indonesia would be very proud of him, if they could see him doing the nasty with Russian girls.
More details here (along with the KBG story): https://medium.com/war-is-boring/the-cia-and-kgb-tried-to-bl...
Even though asian countries view sex as just another thing and not so much sex positive.
The referenced article in this thread mentions some of the history of the Lena image, but Wired did a good job finding the actual woman in question and talking about some of the social history. [1]
I was never on the Well, Fidonet, CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy or any other BBS systems, but from this article [2] you can see that low-res text-based block character "images" were possible. The minute you can make something display an image, someone is going to figure out how to put porn on it.
Apparently there was MacPlaymate, a 1-bit image depth interactive program (distributed on 3.5" floppies) from 1986. NSFW [3]
Usenet was definitely part of the early mass sharing of porn online, but as far as I can tell image binaries date (e.g. alt.sex.pictures.erotica.* or alt.sex.binaries.*) more to early 1990s, not 80s. Downloading low-res images over a 14.4 modem in multiple UUencoded text messages based only on a title (or perhaps a frequent, trusted poster) and re-constructing them into a GIF or JPG was very very slow, but where there's a will there's a way - or so I'm told...
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/1994/01/09/arts/porn-the-low-slung-e...
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/finding-lena-the-patron-saint-of...
[2] https://spectrum.ieee.org/social-medias-dialup-ancestor-the-...
[3] https://imgur.com/a/LhTrq
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.
I think something's wrong here :)
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)
They told the actor what to say: they were a silent cue, a prompt or reminder.
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?
I just don't understand why they start with counts, that's all.
I don't think I've ever heard someone say "That'll be dollar 50" though? I they did, I'd assume they were talking about something that costs $1.50
Either way works ok. If you're doing RLE at the bit level, you only need counts and not values, but that's obscure.
If you do count first, you can use a zero count to indicate a run of single repeats. There are many other ways to do that, though.
I've never seen anyone come up with an encoding that was ambiguous to decode. Of course, there's usually many ways to encode something.
It makes a nice interview problem because compression is a real problem, but RLE needs almost zero previous knowledge, has many reasonable answers, doesn't have a gotcha solution, and most people haven't done it before. Lots of typically better compression algorithms out there, but I don't think any are suitable for general interview.
However, since you also want to be able to represent runs longer than 255 (if you're doing it on byte level), you can solve both problems. If you encounter repeated runs of the same literal, just combine them into a bigger number. So A2A2 should be read as "A times (0b00000010 00000010)" whereas A4 should be read as "A times (0b00000100)."
There are some subtleties still to make it a bijective code, related to end handling and how to represent variable length numbers uniquely, but it's perfectly possible, and once you get it right it isn't really larger than "regular" RLE.
It's an interesting challenge to write bijective encodings. I feel it's a bit like writing quines, you have to keep in mind a thing you usually don't. For quines, "what this does to the text you need to output", for bijective encodings, "what this does for the inverse function". Not saying you should give it as an interview question, though!
See e.g. page 24/27 of https://www.dca.fee.unicamp.br/~martino/disciplinas/ea978/tg...
I don't understand how literal-first make all codes correspond to exactly one decoding. Do you have an example?
NSFW?
http://www.roysac.com/asciinudes/default.html
http://www.roysac.com/asciinudes/default.html#Joan
...is the all time classic. Every time I logged onto a new mainframe/DEC-VAX system, it'd be sitting in a folder somewhere.
I even had a personal copy printed out on several sheets of paper[1] that has now alas, been lost to time.
--
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_stationery
Digital porn was around even before graphics were common.
Same thing with movies, there's an ASCII art animated star wars somewhere, too.
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
1 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:S-100_graphics_card...
2 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroAngelo
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...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
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
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Archimedes
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
Nintendo placed a lot of value in their family-friendly image and locked the Famicom/NES down so that to get your cartridges manufactured you had to go through Nintendo's approval process. Nintendo of America was quite notorious for what they didn't allow, going to some Comics Code Authority-levels of censorship.
Here's Angry Video Game Nerd's video about several of the controversial games on the Atari 2600: https://youtu.be/uLOVemRanhw
Alas, I was too young to cleverly find a way to purchase these without my parents finding out, and was never able to locate a BBS that hosted this type of content.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure_Suit_Larry
The scene at the end was a little bit better but not much.
https://allowe.com/games/larry/tips-manuals/lsl1-age-quiz.ht...
My first contact with digitized smut happened around 1995 I think, when my friend showed me some porn game with short live-action clips on his Amiga (which is sadly not even mentioned in the article, even though its multimedia – and thus porn – capabilities were from another planet compared to PCs in the early 90s.)
Incidentally, I just recently wrote a PCX decoder for a retrographics project of mine (https://github.com/jdahlstrom/retrofire if anyone's interested).
I personally did a demo that I slipped onto the local computer stores machine that sat in high memory (reset resistant unless held down for few seconds more than a press) TSR kinda thing upon an Atari ST that had a selection of the finest artwork that would cycle thru the selection after a delay of a few minutes displaying a screen capture of a normal desktop. Few weeks later version two had an animated flying phallus sprite across the screen.
But for a generation that found amusement in 55378008 upon a calculator, then it was inevitable.
I think I'm actually pretty good at (video) poker now because of years of playing through these in their different incarnations.
Hence I'm still shit at poker...
The big difference on the 8-bit micros is no Internet, so you would have to find someone physically selling the disc, which was very hard to find. Plus digital scanners were extremely expensive professional gear and digital cameras basically didn't exist. Production was seriously bottlenecked. Still, like life, porn finds a way.
I have a feeling that nudes were the reason it was invented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlacing_(bitmaps)
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.
I would bet someone at Xerox and similar research institues playing with osciloscopes also had a go at it.