ASCII Porn Predates the Internet But It’s Still Everywhere
For as long as humans have used characters to represent language, we’ve made art with them. And where there are people making anything, there will be people making hornier, more erotic versions of that thing—like drawing a pair of breasts and a giant dick using only the characters available on a keyboard.
Pronounced “ass-kee,” ASCII is an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a system for representing 128 English characters as numbers in order to digitally represent text. Beginning in the 70s and 80s, with the invention of technologies like the dot matrix printer and forums such as Usenet, people started stringing ASCII characters together to look like images, some lustier than others.
ASCII porn is credited as being the first form of pornography sent across the internet. Unlike sending image files that were agonizingly slow to download using the day’s dial-up connections, ASCII art loaded as quickly as any other text. And even before image files were transmitted over the internet, ASCII art was a relatively simple way to make and share all kinds of kinky shit.
I have to admit, when I first began this dive into the world of ASCII porn (sometimes styles as pr0n, for the console cowboys in cyberspace), I seriously underappreciated the depth and breadth of the art form. As I would imagine most people with a cursory sense of internet culture might, my knowledge of ASCII porn started with ( . )( . ) and 8==D, and ended around a few scant examples like this booty-slap gif:
