In 1983, the military split Arpanet into a military section and a civilian section and the Internet was born.
Arpanet was the original network of personal computers communicating to each other through modems and telephone lines. Even before a few computers networked to each other evolved into the World Wide Web, porn was there. A simplistic version of dirty pictures called ASCII pr0n, was one of the main bits of information being shared by geeks on a new type of application called e-mail. Then Timothy Berners-Lee invented a way for networked computers to view each other's files with a code named HyperText Markup Language or HTML.
After that came the development of browsers that allowed users to see all the different files in a graphical page setting. Following that was a rapid-fire introduction of technologies. Microsoft released the easy-to-use Windows 3.0 operating system in 1990. In 1991, the first commercial Internet access providers were licensed. In 1993, the Pentium processor suddenly raised the home computer from the status of glorified paperweight to a moving vehicle on the information highway. All the while, porn (and the desire to see it in detail) helped to fuel the evolving flux we now know as cyberspace.
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Clever folks built link lists like Beth Mansfield who made Persian Kitty. Others jumped right in with the concept of sex sites available to members only. They then enticed smaller webmasters to sell memberships for them by promising a small commission for every sale. The sponsor/affiliate program was born and entrepreneurs like Seth Warshavsky of IEG and Clublove.com were able to elevate their network of adult websites into million dollar industries.
To quote Washington Post columnist John Schwartz, in a 1997 article:
"But when it comes to technology, porn serves as something of a pioneer, breaking ground that will eventually serve mainstream uses as they overtake the sexual ones. When that transformation takes place on the Internet, many of the success stories will owe an unspoken debt to the lessons learned by the pornographers."
Because porn paysites needed a way for surfers to easily buy their memberships, the programmers that developed credit card processing software flourished. Because porn users were demanding higher quality images and video downloads, companies such as Real Media found subsidy to develop streaming video and audio. Little codes that track user information known as cookies were first tested on porn sites. Any and all advertising methods first were tried by Adult webmasters. Search engines and directories owe their existence to all those horny surfers that needed a map to find the paths to online porn. The porn business model is one of the few working models on the Internet today.
To be an Adult Webmaster, one has to know more than just how to post a few links on a web site. The Adult Webmaster is on the cutting edge of Internet technology. To understand how to be a success, knowledge of the Adult Internet's past, present and future is your best starting point.