If we had the internet a decade earlier...

[Sharkhunter]

Originally Posted by Girlfan

I think Shanine was one of those girls who did "nearly but not quite" hardcore pics, including a well-known set with Jo Guest and a (very) lucky guy:

Ah, the sort of stuff you could only find in Whitehouse and the like. I remember having the odd copy, and I'd have to make a journey to another newsagent on the other side of town to scope to buy it. Appropriately, it was always the newsagents with the dodgy looking guy behind the counter who'd have Whitehouse, Playbirds and Derriere on his top shelf.

I remember turning each page hoping to finally see either Jo or Shanine clearly photographed gulping down some man meat. Never happened though!

I first had internet access in (I think) 1996 or so, but what a very different place it was back then! You actually had to seek out porn then, rather than it tumbling out at you from every angle of the digital World!
I well remember the usenet groups - I think something like alt.binaries.lesbians was my favourite - and that after an hour of use, you might have managed to get your hands on 10-15 pictures. A lot harder than what we could get here in the UK at the time, but then real hardcore was never my favourite, so I stuck to magazines - and increasingly as the 90s progressed, perhaps oddly, (VHS) videos.

I was first able to get online around 1992, at university. I was already on the politics, history and sports newsgroups, and just went on the fledgling porn ones as well. As far as I was concerned I was downloading documents and journals, and nobody looked to see that I was on alt.binaries.blondes or the like. I gathered that there was no way the tech teams had of could trace the individual newsgroups, so there was never really any way of getting caught. Of course, I never actually put the files together on the shared machines; I simply copied them onto a floppy disc and did the rest on my own PC in my digs. Of course, back in those early days, an internet connection outside of a university or research centre was pretty uncommon.

I too had my first home internet connection around 1995/96, with a then "fast" 56.6 modem. In addition to backing up my magazines (mainly Pl@b0y special editions like their Book of Lingerie) with digital images, my online hunt was in the main for hardcore - the sort of stuff you couldn't get hold of without having to go into London and down a flight of dodgy stairs. I am sure some of you folks who lived around the London area will remember Lovejoys - within shooting distance of Shaftesbury Avenue - which had a fine selection of military history books on the ground floor and a eye-boggling cornucopia of pornography in the basement - including imported magazines like Private. I remember buying a dodgy VHS copy of Private's Cumshot Deluxe as well - to think the lengths one had to go, eh?

By the end of 1999 I was disillusioned by the way my favourite magazines like Club and Men Only were going, and I simply stopped buying them, virtually overnight. In fact, apart from a flurry of buying (or rather, re-buying) 1980s and 90s mags from the sainted Jobbydealer in the early 2000s, I think I have only bought one new magazine from a newsagents since the turn of the Century. That was just to "see what they were like now", and would have been in around 2005. I wish I hadn't bothered: shaved pussies, plastic boobs, rampant tatoos and hard-faced anything-for-the-money girls proliferated - everything I dislike in smut. There were, of course, notable exceptions such as "Stella"/Sophie Moone and others, but they appeared (to me at least) to be in the minority. Look back at Sharky's post of the Scanmaster images from the mid 1990s: every one of those girls - every one - is a truly beautiful lady. You just don't get that nowadays - the criteria for a girl to succeed nowadays is what she will do not how she looks.

The quality of porn went up and down in waves, and I know just why you gave up around 1999/2000, Girlfan. This was around the time of the "lad's mag", and around that time porn magazines, including the previously reliable PRP titles, tried to follow this route. Collaborations with Max Power, images of girls pissed out of their skins and sitting on the toilet (a memorably lame Club cover even featured such a image), and the like.

Around this time I too was only buying mags sporadically, but for this reason has largely given up too. Mayfair was all about big tits and they supplemented their retinue with fake-breasted girls; Club went all "laddish"; Men Only, perhaps the most risqué of the premier PRP titles, took itself down the level of the publisher's second-rate grot like Escort and Razzle, while Mens World went complete crazily transatlantic with a cast of fake-tits and tattoos. Yes, it was rubbish - to think that up until 1997 there were some absolutely cracking magazines that were published.

However, this changed - certainly as far was Club was concerned - around late 2002. The new editor seemed to go back to a more traditional "classy" model, and there were no fake breasts to be seen. Tattoos were even airbrushed, with wonderful results such as Natasha Marley looking fresh and fit without her unsightly wrist ink and tramp stamp. Then there was Sophie Moone/Stella - who was, frankly, stellar. It was a cover featuring her and Sandy that got me back into buying the title, and as I kept buying them I was never disappointed. It was then that I decided I was going to keep them all and build a collection - which in turn led to my hunting down older issues on sites like Jobbydealer... Buying mags that rekindled memories from a decade earlier - yes, that decade... the glorious 1990s.

Mayfair also turned out some great issues, and Mens World toned down the plastic a lot to the point where some of the covers were really classy again as they were in the mid-1990s.

However, the final death knell came around 2009. It took a change of editor and then a change of publisher, and every PRP title pretty much went to pot. Tattoos and fake tits stared appearing with regularity in Club - something the probably alienated its core wankership (I can't say "readership" without guffawing slightly!) Some of the covers bordered on ghastly, and the straw that broken the proverbial camel's back was the installation of the post-boobjob Sasha Cane as the regular girl. Now, Sasha was a real hottie and a girl I actually likes, but after that awful boobjob she was simply hideous. Including inked and fake-titted models in Club was bad enough, but having a girl with nipples that made her chest look like a cross-eyed basset hound was just too much. Unlike the copies from 1998-2001 - which just about passed muster for having a decent percent of good-looking models - those from after 2009 were not worth the then extortionate cover price. £4.50 with some shitty lowcore DVD? They were having a laugh!

I gave up on printed porn completely, and would have remained that way were it not for my getting hold of a copy of Barely Legal as part of a bargain stash sometime in 2012. Leafing through the magazine, I found a lovely selection of models who fitted my "type" - mainly flat-chested, attractive, 18-25 types - who didn't dress in pretentious outfits or look fake. Tight t-shirts, thigh-skimming miniskirts, no fake tits, no tattoos... It was like stepping back into the 1990s, but with better production values. There were even models with a healthy smattering of bush. Sweet things with bush!

Having been repulsed by a copy of sister magazine Hustler I would never have bought a sealed copy of BL to take home for fear of finding a catalogue of horrors, but was pleasantly surprised by the old school look - obvious when the wankership demographic (according to Wikipedia) is 40-something males still hankering for their youth. I checked out a few PDF versions of the title and the content was pretty consistent, and like magic I was back buying mags again. I set about bringing together back issues taking me back to 2011 (I might dig back further, but copies are so hard to find now, especially on the wrong side of the Atlantic) and have bought every copy since.

The coterie of models in BL is nigh-on perfect: most of my online favourites have been featured at some point, which was the final proof that this was the magazine for me. The editors have no desire to start adding silicone-enhanced models or inked chicks to the lineup, and I was even happier to discover that many other girls I would have happily added to my digital collection were it not for their ink made the pages of BL... With the unsightly marks professionally photoshopped out. Happy days.

[Sharkhunter]

Originally Posted by Girlfan

A brief observation: looking back at some of these posts my view that the "golden decade" of smut was from around 1985 until 1995. (I use that rather awful word smut as a catch-all covering everything from Page 3 cheesecake shots, through soft-core stuff - actually my favourite area - like Club, Mayfair, Fiesta et al, and off into the hardcore zone).

I am enjoying these exchanges... It's funny what age and memories do to you when talking about something like this. Page 3, pages from a dirty mag... Gotta love it.

I agree about this golden age, and can wax just as lyrical about it. To go back to the original thrust of the thread, and all that. That said, there are plenty of fine models today, you just need to know where to look!

It's probably just my age - I was early 20s in 1985, and early 30s by 1995. I suppose that "smut" fans born in say 1985 (so 30 now) would most likely love the stuff from the last 10 years, having been brought up on it, and would look back on my favourite stuff as being ridiculously coy and slightly odd - I can almost here them muttering from beneath their baseball caps "didn't those women have access to a razor? Why do they all have such small tits? Wouldn't they look better with some nice body art?"

Different times, but I know which I prefer.

Same age patterns, same thoughts. Nothing beats a bit of old school bush, which is why I think Barely Legal is a fantastic modern-era magazine that stands out from the crowd. As I said in my previous post, there's something wonderfully old school about it. Yes, many of the girls have bald muffs - as is the fashion these days - but there is a wonderfully decent percentage of bush.

[CARLTON BROWN]

I was on 56k dialup by the mid-90s (using it was pretty expensive) and as I recall, nearly all the porn was on newsgroups at that time and not too good in terms of quality. No idea if these still exist or how you would access them.

[Girlfan]

Andrea Clarke, at one time the regular girl in Club could well have been an internet star, had her career been say 10 years later than it was. She was just so damn dirty looking (in a good way), that I think she'd have built up a legion of internet fans. She's best known for softcore, of course (at which she excelled):




However, she was never adverse to a bit of soft-ish sapphic adventures, which always appeal:


Occasionally, her forays into lesbianism got a little more exciting, a little more daring, as here, with Sarah Young:


Of course, she also did full-strength hardcore - well, at least she did it once:


What a girl!

[LadyLuck]

Originally Posted by Sharkhunter

I am sure that there are some of you around my age or older who will remember binary files, and downloading a series of files from Usenet newsgroups - with a slow dial-up connection, of course.

I started out downloading from assorted local BBS systems. Most of the content was stored locally on those "servers". Some had access to Usenet relays but they were often text only.

I had one of those tedious little hand scanners back in the day and scanned what I had and uploaded it. I still see my scans making the rounds some twenty years later. They are small and mediocre quality compared to what is available today but some of the pics have never seen later release so it's my scans or nothing.

[buttsie]

If the internet were 10 years ahead i wonder how many models wouldnt have dabbled in harder shoots on the continent?

There were an absolute plethora of amateur models flogging off their sites but few were buying because of the quality.

Until broadband came along and made webcam shows possible they were off the radar

Cant say i miss the 2001-2005 period with the exception that material thats no longer about keeps turning up from that era via the waybackmachine 1995-

The scanners were pretty prolific around then and judging by the scan section they were actually doing a better job than the so called pros

back then it was more about swapping not sharing with anyone and everyone



Maria Sheriff from 2001 - unknown shoot / site to me

It was only when sites like oidsworld popped up and started uploading real content
that it became interesting as opposed to frustrating...the copyright police soon put and end to his site

Sites like adult check with their 2 tiered system gave porn a bad name imho

I can recall being pointed towards alt.binaries.nospam.britishbabes
or something like that...not being a collector it seemed a bit too easy
no thrill of the chase

P2Ps as opposed to torrents were a nightmare if the uploader was on dialup

Great old porn sites that are gone.
http://vintage-erotica-forum.com/sho...eat+porn+sites

[IronMan]

Assuming this meant that data storage would have also improved, I would hope that the length of porn scenes would increase. With VHS they wanted to cram as many scenes on the tape as possible so you had scenes that were 10 minutes or less. Such a waste. I don't want to watch eight minutes of foreplay and oral and then a minute and a half of fucking before the cumshot.

[Sharkhunter]

Buttsie, spot on mate. Girlfan - couldn't agree more about Andrea Clarke. She wasn't really my type at all, but she clearly had that "look" that shifted neatly between angelic and utterly filthy - had the Internet been around then, she'd have been a major star, for sure.

Then there's the fact that unlike a number of other glamour models in her time she was actually photographed, if just the once, with a cock inside her mouth rather than hovering millimetres away.

[Girlfan]

Been thinking a lot about Karen White recently. Ludicrously pretty, killer body, and my two person essentials (no tattoos, and a trimmed but unshaven bush). Surely, had the internet started 10 or 15 years earlier, she would have become a global superstar. I can easily imagine myself forking out the required cash each month to subscribe to her (sadly imaginary) site back in say 1995.....

Here's a selection of some Karen White images to remind you. What a girl.....

[swilley06]

Originally Posted by soulreaper

If i had it erlier, i think, i witnessed the good big-boobed models(hard and soft) at their prime. Girls like Lisa Lipps,



Letha Wheapons




Angelique




Traci Topps




Alyssa




Babbette




or Dixie



The list goes on and on....

At the other thing, i witnessed the next generation, like

Sharday




Autumn Jade




Linsey




And, of course Kerry Marie

Totally agree with you here. Imagine seeing these huge breasts in 1080p! The video quality was so bad in the 90's that we really didn't get a true sense of how big those ladies were.