To pay for the purchase. To find that book you’ve been looking for so long. To get in touch with that friend who is on the other side of the world, and see her as if she were in front of you. Even to read this very article, at this very moment. The Internet, the network that has connected us all in the 21st century, and that has been a turning point in our society, is used for all this, and much more. So much so that we are still not aware of the real change we have undergone, especially those of us who were born with the first throes of the web. Those that were marked by the beeps of an old 56k modem that only allowed connection or telephone, but not both. Now we have breakfast while Alexa tells us the news of the day, we start to send emails and participate in Zoom conferences. And to counteract, when we can rest, we stay watching a series on Netflix or a video on Youtube.
We literally spend all day connected, on the computer, on television, on our own phone. The download speed and broadband of the Internet today allow us to enjoy high-quality movies in streaming, including live online shows. And everything just one click away, and on many occasions, completely free of charge, or for a very small payment. In just 20 years, times have changed tremendously, and the network of networks has developed in an absolutely uncontrollable way. It is impossible to put doors to the Internet, where you have access to all the content you need, and also to the one you don’t need. Social networks, streaming platforms, photos, newspapers, blogs, deep web… An entire universe within our reach. But it wasn’t always like that. There were other times, darker and above all slower, when loading a simple photograph on a page could take hours. And it also meant a dangerous action against the evil of computer viruses. Yes, they still exist today, but back then it was a plague. The era in which porn made the leap to the Internet.
An invention that would change the world
We use it every day, but not many people know the true origin of the Internet. And it is that, like electricity or car engines, it is enough that it works well and that’s it. The Internet is the common name given to the network that unites the majority of computers and electronic devices on the planet. It is done through the WWW protocol, although today there are many different ways to connect. The origin of this invention is in the network ARPANET, created by computer scientists in the 70s, which soon led to a communication network between universities. It would also pass through the hands of the US military, and at the end of the 1980s it would begin to expand. The first computers were connected to each other, with servers at strategic points. Today, barely 30 years later, we carry a device in our pocket that is more powerful than most of those personal computers combined.
Newsletters and the digital revolution
The tool was already created. Now it had to be filled with content. The usual thing, due to the size of the connections and the speed of those rudimentary networks, was to create pages with only text. The forums began to become very popular in those early days. So were the newsletters, to which anyone could subscribe through their mail, to receive them daily. It was in those newsletters, which used to be anonymous and transmitted between users, where the digital porn revolution began. Pornography could not yet be created for the Internet, since this new medium was in its infancy. Therefore, the first thing was the translations of some erotic stories and explicit scenes. The visual material was not long in coming.
Those Internet pioneers ran into a major problem when it came to sharing pornographic content on the Internet. No, it wasn’t censorship, although this would also play an important role… at first. It turns out that in the early 1990s, all porn was hardware. Video tapes, magazines, publications… That had to be transferred to digital support, so that it could be shared over the Internet. And it was not an easy task, exactly. The machines that did precisely that were expensive and did not provide much quality. Even so, the first nude photos, taken from magazines such as Playboy or Hustler, were shared through these newsletters. It was the beginning of a new era that would take some time to evolve.
First pornographic websites
Technology has come a long way in just a few years, and connections have become faster and more powerful. This, together with the ease with which digital was destroying analog, brought with it the definitive leap for the Internet. Products copied from the physical, digitized expressly for the network, were no longer shared. Now original content was created in digital format. The first, of course, photographs. The main pornographic companies of the time found a gold mine in this new online universe, and created their own web pages. There was quality erotic content there, always for payment, of course. The pornographic websites began to reproduce like spores, copying the same content, or uploading a different one.
By the middle of 2005 the Internet was already quite similar to what we have today, at least when it comes to porn. Videos could already be found in digital format, with a reasonable quality. The first one hundred percent digital publications were also created, which had no physical support. This was beginning to be obsolete, because everyone was jumping on the Internet bandwagon. The proliferation of these websites with videos and images came hand in hand with more secure and faster connections, but even so, it could take a long time to download any video, or even a simple photograph, if it was in good conditions. quality. The porn became one of the favorite topics of Internet users, anyway. And it is that the Internet has also shown us what our preferences and priorities are when it comes to sharing information and culture.
Digital porn goes native
In just a decade, the pornography producers went from adapting to the new digital format, the DVD, to having to change it again for the one hundred percent online format. For a few years many physical movies were sold, but when all the porn started to be on the net, that stopped making sense. Why keep boxes and boxes of X movies when we could have them just a click away without taking up space? Since the end of the 2000s, porn was already created for the online digital environment, to be shared on the Internet. Quality has not been lost, and variety has been gained, since today anyone can find scenes to enjoy among the millions of pages about porn that exist.