The back of my dad’s Omni magazines had ads for online Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) where – if you could navigate a maze of operating system configurations, low baud rates, and mild parental suspicion – you could dial-in to an online message board using your first-gen modem to read obcene posts by a ton of dank basement perverts – regardless of the board’s ostensible topic.

I often visited the Sierra Online BBS to search for hints on how to beat Kings Quest V only to find “grown” men replying to innocent gamers with salacious, anonymous bravado. But if it were late at night, and you were sixteen like I was, this might cause you to purposefully wander over to the “Adults Only” BBS, where it got so obscene that you could see the admins erasing posts in real time – literally watching lines vanish mid-sentence. I’d just stare at the blinking cursor, trying to decide whether I was intrigued or just tired. Usually tired.

But I still learned a lot in those days. Universal kinks. Various numbers representing certain sexual positions. It was wild. But not wild enough for visual carnality or dirty pics. This was way before the internet could easily handle imagery. Naw, If you wanted filth, you had to generate it yourself using your own imagination. Unless you were into ass drawn out in ASCII.

So, it was always disappointing.

Kids these days don’t know how good they got it.