I feel like people who grew up with today’s Internet—even some older folks—aren’t aware of what we had to do back in the day if we wanted to consume “porn.” I put that in quotes because, by the modern standard wherein porn is practically wallpaper, what we had to look at was remarkably tame. (This may have also been because I was a young teenager when this all was happening.)

It’s also just a nice object lesson, I think, in what happens under conditions of scarcity. I don’t mean to suggest for a moment that omnipresent porngraphy is a good thing—I very much think that it is not—but rather that scarce pornography shares a lot of similarities with, for instance, scarce music. Perhaps the people reading this blog remember an era when we listened to music on CDs. I would buy a few CDs per month, on average, then excitedly run home, remove their shrink wrap, and begin to consume every available bit of text in the liner notes. Sometimes this meant that I could read the lyrics as I listened to the songs. Other times there would just be funny stuff in the liner notes; I still remember the annotation to Béla Fleck and the Flecktones’ album Live Art, specifically to the version of “UFO Tofu” on there: it contained the palindrome “May a moody baby doom a yam?”

All of which is to say that scarcity made you (or made me, anyway) really cherish the scarce thing. I can get more or less any song I want today [1], so any individual song is not very special. I probably pay less attention to any particular song than I did 30-some years ago. When 3 or 4 CDs’ worth of new music was my monthly allocation, I cared a lot more about each lovingly curated tune.

So let’s talk about the conditions of scarcity we lived with in the early 1990s. First, and most importantly, was probably bandwidth. When I started using BBSes, circa 1991, I was on a 2400-bit-per-second modem. A one-megabyte GIF of a boob, at that speed, would take about an hour to download. The v.34 modem standard came out around 1996, allowing 33,600 bits per second, which would allow us to download our one-megabyte GIF in about 4 minutes.

The limited bandwidth intersected with limits on phone lines. We all had one phone line per household, apart from the occasional home—which I perceived as unfathomably wealthy—that had a second one. If I wanted to connect to the Internet, I had to use my modem to dial out, thereby preventing anyone else in the house from making a call. Back then, voicemail was a premium service for which you paid extra; many people just had an answering machine. So then if someone called your house during the four minutes it took to download your picture of a boob, they’d get a busy signal and be unable to leave a message. Your pursuit of tame-by-21st-century-standards pornography might mean that your parents missed out on the job offer they were waiting for.

As for pornographic video, my mental model back then was that it chewed through one megabyte per second. So a one-minute video would be 60 megabytes, which would take around 4 hours to download on our super-high-speed v.34 modem. So videos were completely out of the question.

Let’s focus, then, on a low-quality GIF of boobies, since that’s basically all we could look at.

First off, you couldn’t look at that low-quality GIF of a boob on the web; this was all before the first major web browser. The web itself may have existed, but most people weren’t using it. We were getting all our files over newsgroups or email.

But it gets worse! If you used email, you couldn’t use attachments until 1996. Before then, if we wanted to attach a low-quality GIF of some boobies to an email, we needed to convert it to ASCII using uuencode. This essentially turns the file to raw ASCII, which you can then paste into the body of an email.

“Are we done yet?” you might be asking. No! Because emails couldn’t be too large: we needed to split the attachments across multiple emails. I don’t recall whether this was a limitation in the email protocols available at the time (SMTP, POP, and sometimes IMAP), or whether it was a concession to slow modem speeds and limited network reliability: better to succeed at downloading 1/4 of a GIF than try downloading the whole thing, fail, and have nothing to show for it.

So now we’ve downloaded a number of emails with subject lines like “Photo of a boob (1/8)”, “Photo of a boob (2/8)”, and so forth. They’re each a jumble of ASCII. Now copy each one to the clipboard and paste it into a raw-text file. Repeat this eight times. Now you have a single large text file. Run it through uudecode, and you’re done! Now you have the boobies you sought.

I’ll grant, of course, that normal people didn’t do this. Normal people didn’t know about newsgroups or uuencode/uudecode. Normal people didn’t start using the Internet until Mosaic came out, at the earliest. That said, I don’t think I was alone in squinting at scrambled premium cable TV on the (very) off chance that a boob would slip through. I would also saunter into my neighborhood convenience store, veeeeery casually look at the racks of magazines, grab one off the rack, and run out with it. You’ll hear lots of stories, from lads of my generation, about finding magazines and books hiding under their parents’ mattresses or sitting in their parents’ nightstands. They’d be passed around like samizdat. Uuencoded samizdat was just another approach to the same thing.

I don’t know why I thought this might interest people. Mostly, I think, because it was only ever the domain of a small group of nerds in the early 1990s. Others may be abstractly aware that the Internet was slower back in the day, but they may not understand exactly how this translated into the lived experience of a horny 13-year-old. Now they do.

[1]—With the exception, I regret to say, of Elvis Costello’s “Cheap Reward (Honky Tonk Demo),” which is one of my favorite songs of his and is seemingly only available to you if you can get your hands on the physical album. It’s also no longer possible to listen to Stephen Colbert sing that demo, with Elvis on guitar, back when Elvis was a guest on The Colbert Report. Neither here nor there, I guess; this is just one of the sadnesses I carry with me.