Serious chat about Pornography and Amiga's role in history of it online.

[YouKnowWho]

It would be interesting to talk about history of pornography on computers, and what role, if any Amiga played in the timeline of history.

The graphic image capabilities of Amiga, along with capture on devices like Digi View (1986) surely found use in early computer adult content. Andy Warhol launching the Amiga 1000? Has anyone seen Andy Warhol art exhibits? Videos? I have little doubt that Video Toaster was used to edit adult content extensively in California in the 90s. VHS existed because of adult content as we well know.

2026 has just started and so we got to enjoy the usual end of 2025 tech stats, including one that stated that in 2025 just over 30% of internet traffic was pornographic content. In 2025? When all those LLM scrapers are running amok and generating all that extra traffic? In 2025? When all those bots are clicking and loading pages pretending to be humans to generate ad-revenue for Big Tech? ...we're still at 30%? WOW. With all that streaming and Netflix and YouTube and business data, and government and email....still 30%? Did I say WOW?

Clearly this product always has and always will be a big internet traffic market-share holder. And so, what are our recollections of this in terms of computer history? Commodore goes bankrupt 1994, and interestingly enough this is when internet starts taking off with a browser. I think I remember hearing that at the time there were around 80 websites, and half were pornographic. Wiki page on internet pornography says that in 2022 there were 10 petabytes of pornographic data on the internet. (may sound like a lot, but that's what...just really 400 large capacity hard drive's worth of data?). Isn't it ridiculously funny that ChatGPT and Grok are getting so much press about adult content generation lately? So desperate for revenue "A.I." seems to be, they cannot overlook this huge segment of internet content. I can't recall any mainstream associations of the Amiga and adult content in the press, but I do recall some CD-ROMs being sold with images in back pages here and there in the early 90s.

My experience with the Amiga has always been quite innocent and focused on games and some of the basic productivity capabilities.
With the graphic capabilities that it had since the very start, I remember a folder with some adult images on a local Amiga BBS, but images were far down my download list considering my 28.8baud modem and limited BBS time. And where would I store this stuff - not on my precious 20MBs of space on my A590. I did have a strip poker Amiga game on a floppy, but it seemed low-action vs. what other video games were available so never played it after initial look. It all seemed labour intensive for pixelated graphics vs. just buying a Playboy magazine. But still, surely Amiga plays a role in this application. What was it? In a recent search of Amiga stuff, this was the cover of September 1995 (after Commodore end) Amiga Magazine that I came across (below). Was the Amiga an early adapter of adult content on computers due to the graphic capabilities it had? Was there a scene? Can it claim any "achievement" in this area in what has become a major market share element of today's internet?

 

[tbtorro]

Hm... I would not classify boobs on home computer screens porn. First exposure to "online porn" was countless 16k 4 colour (!) CGA GIFs of boobs of one description or another. Got them on an A2KHD with dialup. Some took 10-15m to download through a 2400B modem line from usenet/BBSs. Phone bill went to the sky, parents went ballistic, and we traded said GIFs on floppies with great gusto All the while, for a fraction of the bespoke phonebill we could have bought real adult magazines, and a stack of it of the height of a small dog. In high res and full color. Go figure.

And a bit off topic: Once a long time ago, a group of us crowded a friend's dad PC who had one of the first copy of Win95 running on it with dialup CompuServe or whatnot.
Dad (hovering with the mouse over the Start button): "So, this is the new Windows 95 with Internet on it. What should I show you kids? What would you like to see?"
Us (looking at each other, then, after a brief pause, unanimously): "Porn!"

 

[Xanxi]

If you want to see boobs with your Amiga, you can check the french magazine Amiga Concept https://www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=2&page=1 (late to the party, published from 1994 to 1995).
For some reason they included a female playmate on a poster inside the magazine and as boot picture of their cover floppy disk.
They used to cause me embarassment because i had younger brothers or other family checking my Amiga or videogame magazines, and at that time I was still slightly more interested in computers than boobs. As a matter of fact, in the meantime my computers aged so far better than any boob anyway.

 

[DeluxePiantXX]

During my young Amiga Days I had contact with this:

Stag 6 - The Bride of Son of Stag Strikes Back Again! Part II +

Classicamiga.com - The home of the Commodore Amiga. Devoted to keeping the memory of the Amiga alive. Guides to Amiga emulation and the real Amiga. Resource site containing an Amiga archive of Amiga magazine scans, Box art scans, and Amiga Game Manuals. Also the home of the Amiga Demo scene...

www.classicamiga.com

 

[uniquefreak]

Does anyone remember, one of the main magazines who at the time shipped a CD or 2 on their mag, replacing cover floppy discs. One month, the cover CD had a hidden folder or partition, with 100s of MBs of Porn Pictures (I say porn, I think it was limited to topless/swimsuit) images. Clearly not intended or documented as part of the content. I always wondered if it was an internal error when burning the master copy, or a practical joke/disgruntled employee who did it.

I was also amazed that there wasn't any follow up repercussions in the press. I can only imagine if someone's parents had become aware of it, they would have likely given the Mag hell!

This was likely around 32/33 years ago.

 

[YouKnowWho]

@tbtorro - Indeed, when pondering this, one cannot overlook that this would truly be software that is completely computer platform independent. First, it makes me wonder if the reason we have such standardized image file compatibility from the start of compute was due to porn. Second, I cannot say that I DO NOT want to see CGA palette pixel boobs. That's retro computer ART! Retro Museums should have exhibitions.

@DeluxePiantXX - Back in the day, there was a cool TV show called "Beyond 2000" and on it they discussed technological progress happening around the world. One episode featured an LCD sensor that was used to give a blind man 64 pixel by 64 pixel grayscale "sight". I clicked on your link and on the previews of The Bride of Son of Stag (gotta admit - killer title) and these images look like what that blind man was said to have "seen". . By the way, if this blind-man-sight LCD-to-Brain connection was achievable back in the late 90s to give a blind mand 64x64 32-grayscale sight, why is this technology not available to blind people today? I wonder this at least once a year.

@uniquefreak - 32 to 33 year ago you say? So like 1992/1993? 100MB of sexy images FREE? Whoever did that, maybe a hero to many, as there was no bandwidth, sneakernet, or in this case sneakynet saved many hours of modem downloads. Makes me think of Fightclub. . Also, I feel like this was perhaps quietly sponsored by a manufacturer of CD-ROM drives.

@Xanxi - The French using sex to sell goods? This is revolutionary how exactly? I had a good Parisian friend at this time (90s), and he used to put "FREE SEX" as subject to his prospecting emails, because he said: "Everyone opens this email!" I know what you're thinking - primitive. But back in the mid 90s, people were not at all sensitive to spam, and were happy to get an email. And one that had that as subject, well...let me just say, he was the most successful and guess what we eventually started doing? That's right! ...until we were told to stop for professional reasons. Success suffered as a result of new policy. Good times!

 

[Olivier]

Just one floppy: sexy party games! I spent the nights and maybe I lost my sight there!

 

[pms]

@tbtorro - Indeed, when pondering this, one cannot overlook that this would truly be software that is completely computer platform independent. First, it makes me wonder if the reason we have such standardized image file compatibility from the start of compute was due to porn. Second, I cannot say that I DO NOT want to see CGA palette pixel boobs. That's retro computer ART! Retro Museums should have exhibitions.

Standarized image files? I still have some Amiga "Deluxe Paint Anim" files. Never found time to convert them to GIF anims

 

[YouKnowWho]

@pms - oh my goodness....animation file? In grey? In what res are these? Again...I say this is retro computer art! Oh, the limitations people put up with to see some pixel-grey-skin. Then again, these were the days where we would slow down in the sleepwear section of the Sears catalogue. But these were also the days where any convenience store would sell you a playboy, so the ROI calculation on these files just seems like it should return a GURU MEDITATION.

I've been watching some old Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, and in one I saw a sequence where I think Porkey pays to watch a skin slide show. The B&W images flicker in the viewer as she lifts her dress and shows some leg up to the knee, and he gets all steamed up like a locomotive. This is pretty much that, just digital. The effort it took to make these files. The dedication. In the binary sort, I'm putting this one on the side of art. Prototype-digital-porn - beta version. ART!

I bet you Warhol had a collection of these files. Folder name?

 

[roy_bates]

to be honest,ive seen less dressed women going out to parties and clubs even back in the day,the stuff on magazines was tame

as far as porn was,ive seen it on 8 bit machines,real porn,not just naked women,but in middle of sex acts etc,be it static images or animated,porn was and still is everywhere on computers if you looked hard enough ,did it effect the " amiga scene",i dont think so

if you wanted to look at it,it wouldnt be difficult to find

 

[AmigaPete]

I remember signing up to Rusty and Edie's BBS in New York state. So not only did I pay a subscription fee but I also had to deal with long distance fees from the phone company. I did that for a couple months. Once I had a CDROM drive attached to my A2000 it was a lot easier to buy CDROMs with various collections of images like this one below (dated 1995), which I still have for purely historical reasons at this point in my life. I remember going to a local computer show and they had an adult section curtained off where one could buy all sorts of VHS, CDROM and even floppies.

I don't think the Amiga contributed more or less to the advent of pornography. It just did its' part. I remember friends with PCs having the same level of content/access. A lot of early stuff was just magazines being scanned and uploaded to BBSs.

 

[YouKnowWho]

@roy_bates - 8bit machines? More art! It's true - this is simply a distribution and consumption tool, and everyone attempted to distribute on any platform there was. I thought that Amiga played a more active role because of a) graphic capability b) affordability c) image software d) video editing capability, but as you note, it was everywhere. VGA on PC is out 1987, barely year later we get Super VGA - Amiga is just getting a footing in the market.

And as @AmigaPete adds, bandwidth was a challenge with distribution - hence some sort of sneakernet, and what CD-ROM offered was simply ahead of the curve in terms of capacity and convenience. This is actually a strange time in computing history by today's standards when we quickly and easily rip a DVD onto our hard drives because most of us had a 20MB hard drive, or 40MB hard drive and we were happy with it or it was all we could afford. Yet a CD-ROM could store 650MB - (that's 15 or 30 of such size hard drives), and you were not tempted to need to back CDs up. Strange to have hard drive capacity so far behind optical disc in this period. Then again, I find it strange today that we rely so much on magnetic storage formats and have so few non-magnetic backup options. Or that consumers move toward ever cheaper and less reliable NAND data storage, including stuff like QLC. At least with a magnetic hard drive you have a shot at recovery in worse case scenario, because there is actual media. Although if we ever get that giant solar flair magnetic storm...who knows? Flash storage? Odds of recovery are darn near nil. Unusual that consumers accept this either blindly or without knowing what the risks are. But back in the day, CD-Rom was a good distribution method and quite a reliable data format.

Side story: I once met a guy at NAB who worked for what was apparently a decently resourced porn company editing content. In a brief chat he delivered a gem of a punchline. He said "Do you know how my boss knows I'm not working? When he sees I DON'T have porn on my screen."