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kbelderlast Saturday at 7:03 PM0 repliesview on HN

Way back when, before it was very feasible for the general public to get internet access (in the Mosaic days, maybe 94 or 95), I found that I could access my local college library with my dial-up modem. Their system let you connect to the lending services of other university libraries. I found one (maybe Oregon State?) that let you access Gopher. That was pretty interesting in it's own right, but there was no ability to display images, and the functionality to download files was removed, so pornography was frustratingly hard to obtain. You could look at ascii art...

But you could dump uuencoded binary files to the screen. Capture it, read it from the text buffer, reformat it, decode it, and then... a glorious 25kb jpg of a scanned Playboy image. (In HAM mode on my Amiga.)

I spent so much time doing that stuff. Wasted time, in a sense, but it motivated me to learn much I might not otherwise have bothered to. The desire of a young man to see a woman in her glory should not be underestimated; societies suffer if they point that energy in the wrong direction.

As a 37-year old married man, the OP has probably acquired some other motivations, though.