At 17:03 12/01/03, Harald Tveit Alvestrand wrote:
Despite having lived through much recent history, I've forgotten a lot of it....Obviously depends on what you mean "on-line".
I just wonder: does anyone know/remember when the first Web porn site came online?
Wondering whether it was before or after the first official release of Mosaic....
1. as Dave said there were sex oriented "areas" on many computers.
2. I suppose the first commercial sex sites were on Minitel.
3. This means that technically they were on-line from the Internet legal perspective when it interconnected the public nets (84). Actually a few Internet private gateways existed before and some Intelmatics tests were probably carried in the USA as early as 1982, with protocol conversion. I would be surprised that no one test connected them from ARPANET. When people tested from abroad, I do not know why, they always did it with a porn site.
4.UK Universities also shared into Prestel and some where on the Internet (you should inquire there. They had a leading data brokering firm that "on-line", I Oxford (?) I think). I do not know about Paris University, but we can investigate.
jfc