I knew there was a lot of porn on the web. It’s a given. But I wasn’t aware of the impact of the industry until reading this little article, 12 ways porn has changed the web.
Case in point. #7: Broadband
In the 1990s, Penthouse magazine gave away 2400-baud modems with the periodical’s logo on them, according to Gerard Van Der Leun, former director of Penthouse.com and current contributor to American Digest. At the time these modems offered the fastest way to access the magazine’s popular XXX bulletin boards. Clearly, in the early years of the Net, nobody had a greater need for a bigger, fatter pipe than the adult industry and its customers.
Though the evidence is largely anecdotal, various authorities believe that “acquiring higher resolution pornographic images faster promoted broadband connections,” as Jonathan Coopersmith, an associate professor of history at Texas A&M, put it in a 2006 paper on the nature of computer-based porn PDF.
So the military made the web, and porn made it better. Hmmm, interesting.