I've been thinking of doing this article for awhile, and mainly it's just been an issue of getting off my ass and writing it; however, due to the frequency of my friends asking me about getting porn, I've decided to write it all up in a short history and a tutorial.

But first, my disclaimer:  If you haven't figured it out by the title, this article is rife with links to material that is inappropriate for minors and advice on how to obtain additional enormous quantities of said material.  Further, it's a lot racier than the average Rush article.  Neither Rush nor myself will be responsible for flunking out of college, carpal tunnel syndrome, eternal damnation (of course if you believe in that, then you have no free will, and this disclaimer doesn't apply in a metaphysical sense anyways), or arrest by federal agents for whatever life decisions made as a result of being exposed to a new and fascinating aspect of the world.

History

In order to fully appreciate the treasures which I'm bestowing upon the ignorant masses, one must appreciate the history behind the machine of the Usenet (also known generically as "newsgroups").  Of course this is mostly just idle speculation and nostalgia, so if areas of this section don't make sense to you, just skip to the next section, or learn yourself by referencing a technology dictionary.

Academics have speculated that pornography drives modern technology, such as the VCR and Internet, and I'm not one to debate this (you can see Christianity.com's take on this here).

Now the Usenet came into being way back in 1979.  In relative terms, this is before myself, the IBM PC, the Macintosh, and MS-DOS, but a little after Pong.  Of course this was all long after the invention of pornography.

Of course, being the average computer geeks, the first goal of any of this endeavor was to exchange porn.  Sure, they always had ASCII porn as a backup, but the Usenet opened up the possibility of mass exchange of the photographic, dirty, hardcore Swedish stuff.

So sometime during the `80s, I was introduced to the Usenet by my uncle, who was an undergrad in the Computer Science at Ohio State.  Sure, there were interesting discussion groups on Polish linguistics and so on, but of course, the main draw was the porn.

In the crude stone age of the Eighties, people used such tools as 1200 baud modems (as compared to today's 56k modems and broadband) and Telnet, UUDECODE, and Kermit software to get our porn, all of which required some technical expertise.  Nevertheless, over time, new tools were developed, and with the development of broadband technologies, the process of getting porn was severely expedited and made easy for the common man.  This process has led to a great wealth of porn flow over the Internet, and the knowledge remains mostly underground, but the anticipated "Porno Renaissance" draws near.

Tutorial

So how can you get in on this Porno Renaissance?  It's free (most of the time anyways), easy, and just takes a little bit of initial work.

The first thing you must do is determine whether or not your Internet Service Provider offers a news server.  Most of them do, but you probably haven't heard about it, because they don't publicize them.  The best way to determine this one is to call them up and ask them, and if so, ask what the address of the news server is, generally of a similar form to: news-server.your-isp.com

If your provider doesn't have a new server, I would recommend that you discontinue service immediately, as your ISP is substandard.  This applies to both AOL and MSN users.  However, if you insist on keeping your ISP, you can always check out a list of Open News Servers, which are generally unreliable, or pay for access to one.

Now many of you may be thinking that paying for access is a rip off, but if you're already paying for porn in some capacity, or just have an obsession with porn, you won't be disappointed.  I will venture that in a week, unless you make a specific effort not to, that you can easily fill your hard drive, regardless of size, with porn.  In fact, I used to have a roommate who had a (literal) terabyte of porn obtained from newsgroups in a week, but I won't get into that.

As a note for the next section, text markers and labels will be marked in "quotes" while menus, commands, and buttons will be marked in bold, and newsgroup names or name segments will be written in italics.  Further, this is all for the PC, as I don't know anyone who uses a Macintosh at home.  Mac users should be able to glean the important information from this tutorial if they're bright though.  I would, however, recommend Newswatcher news reading software for Macs.

Next, I would recommend you download Forté's Free Agent software from their site, Tucows, or Download.com.  There are other software packages that you can use, but none are as consistent as Free Agent, and this tutorial is geared specifically towards Free Agent.

Install the software and then run it.

You should receive a dialog menu with a text box labeled "News Server".  Type in your news server address, skip everything else.

Free Agent will ask you if you want to download all the newsgroups, select Yes.

You will soon have a list displayed in the area labeled "All Groups".  The number of groups on your server will be displayed in the bottom left corner in the status bar.  A good server has around 30,000 plus newsgroups or just lots of alt.binaries groups, for example, some of the groups on my news server:

alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.bestiality.hamster.duct-tape (Really.)
alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.heavy-metal
alt.fan.backstreet.boys
alt.skateboard
comp.graphics.apps.photoshop
comp.lang.java
rec.games.chess
rec.gardens.orchids
rec.travel.asia
soc.culture.estonia

As you can see, there are quite a variety of topics to discuss; however, the ones we're interested in start in alt.binaries, if your server does not offer any of alt.binaries newsgroups, you should follow the advice given to those whose ISPs don't have news servers above.  Of the alt.binaries groups, I'm going to start you out with one of the more tasteful ones

In your Edit menu, select Find and input alt.binaries.pictures.centerfolds.playboy.  Once you've got it highlighted, right click on it and check Subscribe.  Next, double click on the newsgroup name and select the Get All Message Headers option.  After a few seconds, items will be displayed in the message list.

On the left of the message "Subjects" is a list of numbers under the heading "Status".  These numbers represent the number of lines in each message.  The messages that you are looking for generally are in lengths of 1000 or greater.  Before we start downloading pictures, however, I will direct you the Group menu, and the Default Properties option.  In this dialog menu, you will want to click the Attachments tab, and you'll notice a text box labeled "Binary Attachments Directory".  In this box enter the directory to which you want all your porn to be downloaded.  Once this has been done, return to your message list and find a message subject that appeals to you.  If you double-click the subject, you'll notice that the message downloads and displays, full of gibberish.  In order to actually download the message, right click on the subject and select Decode Binary Attachments.  The file will then download to your binary attachments directory, where you can view it through your preferred method.  As a warning, avoid running executable or document files as they are often viruses, in addition, HTML files are generally just annoyances and advertising.

Eventually you'll get the hang of downloading all the porn that your heart desires, and you'll find a method of sorting the good from the bad.  Go to other groups or search for general interest topics using the Find command and repeat the same steps to get more porn to drive your obsession.  Of the other groups, I'm sure you can discover the others by yourself, but as general guidelines, check groups that start in:

alt.binaries.multimedia.
alt.binaries.pictures.

As a closing note to the tutorial, you'll notice that if you click on the "All Groups" tab, that it will become a list called "Subscribed Groups".  This lists all the groups to which you have subscribed.  It is likely that every time you open the program, new messages will be available, to update your message lists, go to your Online menu and select Get Messages in Subscribed Groups.  This will update your messages for each new visit.

If you need any further assistance, look in Free Agent's Help menu, the Forté site, and also, some of the messages within newsgroups are other readers who have posted advice, so check those out.  AOL offers a FAQ on newsgroup etiquette with lots of useful information. Any further questions not answered after searching these sources should be directed to the forums.

As a bizarre note, shortly after finishing this article, I've given up porn, seemingly forever.  Hallelujah!  But that doesn't mean you have to...

Speaking of my friends and porn, I'm giving mad props to Mrs. Children.

Further, if you really want eternal damnation, I have a friend in Jamaica who guarantees me that this is the place to get in on it.  Of course if you ever decide to visit Hedonism II in Negril, Jamaica with certain members of the Rush staff, we'll be glad to help you reach lower levels of hell, as described in Dante's Inferno (here it is in the original Italian), between a couple of drinks at the unlimited bar.

Once again, for all of you who are really confused, the Webopedia, a technology dictionary.

For those of you geeks who may actually care, here are histories of the Usenet and of the World Wide Web.  Then a small and crappy page about the history of pornography and technology; shows you what they do at Stanford.

If you're into postmodern ASCII porn, I'm a particular fan of this pic, which can be found at ASScii.com, the self-proclaimed, "Best Ascii Porn On The Net".  If you don't know what postmodernism is, check this site out.

Since I'm dropping off my odd porn links, you might as well check out Porn for the Blind (not tasteful) and, well, I don't know how to explain this one.

If you're really into old school Internet art, you may remember the ACiD group and their ACiD Artpacks.  These were done in both ASCII and ANSI formats.

There's also my shout out to the Computer and Information Science department of The Ohio State University.  If it weren't for them, you wouldn't have this fine tutorial today.  As an added rant, if you're considering colleges, don't go to Ohio State, or even any school in Ohio at all, as Ohio already has the 8th largest in-state tuition on average.  Not to mention the fact that Ohio State is raising tuition for incoming students by 18 percent for the next four years.  Here's the official university statement on stealing from current and future Buckeyes.  My advice as a Buckeye?  Go to Michigan.

A rather seedy Italian site trying to sell a CD on the history of photographic erotica.  Check out the Introduction.

Related on Rush

In our forums, we have a whole forum devoted to discussing Boobies (forum registration required to access), not to mention the Babe Safari, and its accompanying forum.  No doubt the inhabitants of these forums would be greatly appreciative if you tossed them the scraps from your best newsgroup findings, and keep in mind that we have a policy in the forums to not post hardcore stuff (pink, close-ups, and insertion, and so on) and to keep things tasteful, before you decide to share your German fisting finds with us.