ASCII porn

The term ASCII porn –sometimes typographically euphemized as "ASCII pr0n"[1]– describes pornographic images consisting of ASCII art. ASCII porn was the world's first Internet pornography,[2] and was popular (among the then fewer computer users) before the invention of the World-Wide Web, and often found on BBSes and other text mode terminal-based systems that could be reached via direct modem dial-up. It was also exchanged via Fidonet and sneakernet and on the early Internet using pre-WWW services such as email, telnet, usenet and gopher.

A contributing factor to the relative popularity of ASCII porn in its time was high compatibility: the standard ASCII character set could be displayed on most computer monitors –even on early desktops/terminals incapable of displaying digital images[3]– and could be printed on most printers.[4] Also, ASCII porn could be composed by hand using nothing more than a text editor, without the need for a model or camera. With the advent of the World-Wide Web, ASCII porn largely slipped into obscurity.

Net artists in the late 1990s returned to the form, for instance in the work Deep ASCII, a rendering of the movie Deep Throat, created by Vuk Ćosić of the ASCII Art Ensemble.[1] Concrete poet Florian Cramer also produced ASCII work based on sexually explicit images.[5]