In the 1980s, the internet was frequented by three types of people: government officials, university scholars, and porn seekers. The three were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Today's thriving online pornography industry has its roots in the bulletin board systems (BBS) that evolved separately from the internet in the 1980s. They gave way to Usenet newsgroups and free FTP (file transfer protocol, a format for exchanging files over the internet). Users talked about things they had on BBSs and in the newsgroups, then traded the files online.

"The earliest porn sites on the net were FTP sites run for free from college campuses, especially MIT for some reason," said one early watcher of the web who asked to remain anonymous. "All the free sites shut down under escalating traffic load in 93-94. Of course they were all rampant copyright violations, and lots of people stopped carrying the newsgroups because of the huge amounts of bandwidth and storage space they required."

If you cultivate a mushroom in a petri bowl on agar agar, its actual ′′ shape ′′ becomes visible. The essential part of a mushroom, the Mycel, is usually hidden from our eye. What we perceive as a ′′ mushroom ′′ is only its transient fruit body.

Credit: Aimee Cornwell
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