I am curious about the history of porn on the internet. When did video porn first appear online? I know scanned pornographic images were among the first things on the web. The time period I am most interested in is around 1993-94 which is when it really started to take off or so I heard. Also any info on how early porn sites were formatted and run would be greatly appreciated.
Although web porn took off in the mid to late nineties, it was definitely not the first online adult content.
Though the internet really came into its present form on Jan 1 1983 with the adoption TCP/IP protocols, it was not until 1993 that the world wide web was invented. By the end of 1994 there were about 10,000 web sites total
Prior to this there were several online precursors that do satisfy the 20 year rule.
Starting around 1987 was the boom in BBSs. This was not an internet connection but a direct dialup between the customer and BBS site. Rusty and Eddies was one of the first. Connection was via a terminal program that allowed file downloads. Stolen software and images rich in skin tones were popular.
Another precursor was USENET which travelled over the uucp protocol. The original uucp connections were within ATT and started in 1976, expanded outside the company in 1979, and were commercialized in 1987. Also happening on 1987 was the establishment of the alt.* hierarchy, and the among those groups were alt.binaries.pictures. Usenet messages were strictly ascii, and to meet the message size constraints images were broken into multiple messages. Users had to edit the pieces together and then run them through a decoding program to produce an image file.
There is one other precursor which is Ascii art. I can personally attest that pin-up ascii art existed in 1984. The first ascii art was made in 1966, but that was before my time.
Nearly all of this was still images. The AVI and MPEG formats did not exist until the 92 and 93 respectively, and the download speeds were not fast.
BTW There is an authoritative timeline of internet history at ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/rfc2235.txt . It has tables of growth in the early days.
edit: Removed quip about vhs tapes.
As an aside, I was surprised to recently learn that one of the first computerized images ever produced was of a pin-up gal. Forget the 1980s — this was done in the 1950s, on the famous SAGE computer system that was developed to detect incoming Soviet bombers. Story is here.
You may be interested in this previous answer.
The 20 year rule means we can't really talk about anything past 1993. The commercialization of the internet didn't happen in the United States until about 1995. While undoubtedly some some porn existed prior to that, most of that stuff happened afterward.
This question probably isn't answerable as-is.