When I turned 18, I got memberships to all the local video stores. Daisy chained two vcrs together so I could record the adult movies onto one 6 hr vhs tape. Had to hide it from my parents. At one point, I placed it inside a Tupperware container and buried it in the backyard to keep my parents from finding it.

I used to jerkoff to the playboy channel. We didn't get it, I'd watch the scrambled feed. I guess I was just listening to it. God, I'm fucking old.

Having to rewind the VHS tape back to where it was and put it all the way back in the attic.

It’s impossible to overstate how critical the Victoria’s Secret catalogue was.

Every once in a while you would find someone's old stash of porn in the trash.

I remember waiting 30+ mins on dialup for a pic to load clearly enough for me to decide whether it was good enough to wait another 30 minutes for it to completely download or go back and try another link

WWE divas were basically my pornstars in my teens lol

I had to sneak into my garage, into my dad’s stash, find whichever of the 15 or so VHS tapes I wanted, put everything back as if it hadnt been touched, sneak back upstairs, put the VHS into the VCR, turn on my 64 as a coverup, and sit within arms reach of the tv so I could change it lightning fast if I heard anyone coming, which I would because the TV was muted... all at 2am

OR

Once in a blue moon I’d be lucky, the cable was messed up, and the channel after Comedy Central was super grainy, black and white playboy. I don’t know how or why this happened.

It’s strange to think about it now, but how many others ran into porn in the forest? It was like finding hidden treasure.

Nude scenes in mainstream movies were actually something we bothered watching for and talked about. Now, nudity on video has almost no effect on me. I don't know how much of that is because of the ready availability and how much is because I've gotten older.

Funny side note, though - I watched the first Bond film, Dr. No , several years ago for the first time. When I got to that famous scene of Ursula Andress coming up out of the water, I was amazed by how sexy that scene still manages to be.

One thing that must have disappeared now is the furtive handoff of porn mags in a supermarket bag at high school. “Check out October man, it’s awesome and the letters are hot”

If you were so lucky to have a satellite dish with the basic channel package you could be brave and sneak up at midnight, turn off the audio on the tv and tune in to the channel. The one that just went from one movie to another, but at 00:00, that movie was a porno.

Or you could play it smart, do your chores, be the good son and once the parents trust you enough just leave you with cash for a pizza for those evenings when they're off to celebrate some friend's birthday instead of getting a babysitter. That's when you watch it with the audio turned on (not too high though, you wanna be able to hear them returning home) and just absorb as much of the content as possible so you can live on that spank bank until the next time you're left to your own devices.

Oh man did me and my friend fuck up when we were in 6th grade. Basically this was the early part of the internet where schools didn’t restrict anything on the computers and basically you could google (it might’ve been yahoo, not sure it was like 2004) anything.

My buddy looked up Pamela Anderson and she was pretty popular still and we decided to print a photo of her nude (like playboy I think). Problem was, we chose the office printer where the administration is. ALSO when you printed it showed the login on the bottom on the print. Que mission impossible style operation of us going to the main office and distracting the main receptionist while we claim to be grabbing a print from our teacher. Still stressful thinking about to this day.

These kids got it easy nowadays on their phones, back then the family had a computer and you couldn’t just be beating off in the living room.

You did a lot of snooping through your dad’s things looking for it. Hit the jackpot with a cowboy boot box that seemed out of place in the top shelf of his closet. About 10 VHS tapes and a few mags.

I was so meticulous with rewinding to exactly where he left them that I forgot to put them physically back where they were. In my 20s he told me that’s how he knew I’d found his stash.

ever heard the beastie boys song where they sing
"my mom threw away my best porno mags" ?
i (28M) heard that in the car the other day with my gf and thought man how awkward... like, c'mon mom wtf i needed those!!!
ooof

Every dude my age or older has a story about finding a stash of nudie mags in the woods. We literally foraged for porn.

[deleted]

I was class of 06 for highschool, but I grew up with cheap internet 56k dial up when dsl was mainstream. I remember setting 2 minute porno clips to download from kazaa and limewire and they would take over 10 hours just for me to watch that short clip and beat off to the blurriest pussy I've ever seen. Also, in middle school, I knew a guy that would sell printed out pictures of naked women. It was $1 for an 8×11 of a woman and $2 for an 8x11 collage of women. He also had DVDs burned for $5. I remember that 8x11 sheet of paper was the most disgusting piece of paper I've ever held onto lol

I got my hands on a cd-rom with adult content when I was like 15.

You needed to call a premium-rate number and pay some extra by credit card to get a code that you entered in the embleded software that, finally, displayed the desired content.

Of course, by the very nature of the medium, all the information needed to validate the codes needed to be on the disc. Which meant that there was either a logical schema or a list of codes somewhere in there.

I found the file.

That was my first encounter with cryptography. It was some kind of Caesar cipher, maybe a Vigenère cipher. I had no idea what I was doing, but pretty dedicated to doing it.

Took me a whole afternoon to bruteforce the cipher using raw brainpower, paper and a pencil. Content wasn't as good as the process to gain access to it.

And now I'm a software engineer :)

Edit: after 6 years on Reddit, my first award ever is on a post about how I've accessed adult pictures for the first time. Of course. I love you reddit. Thank you kind redditor ❤️

Edit2: awards 🤩 . Glad you guys liked my anecdote !

You got a lot more creative, that's for sure.

I took a porn break for awhile and it was like revisiting an old video game I used to really like.

"Hey, I remember this....my imagination"

Hedge porn was a thing...

Finding a plastic bag full of old readers wives mags was akin to a lottery win

I lived in the middle east, and the "easiest" way to watch porn was to turn your satellite dish to the European Hotbird Satellite, and our parents knew better than to have an automatic rotation device so we had to do it manually.

I waited till every one was asleep and then sneaked to the roof, unscrewed the Dish and rotated it manually to the marks I already drew on the floor with a chalk to mark the right direction of the European satellite, screwed the dish back and zoomed down stairs to start my erotic journey. Once the "Job" was done I had to return the dish to its fucking original position, and by that time we all know that the motivation is gone, but I had to do it to avoid the embarrassment next day.

32 years old today and I wish I have half the motivation I had back then to do anything now.

​

Edit: Internet Era

When we got a dial-up connection it was very expensive, but it was free to use the forums of the ISP. So I used to browse the thumbnails of the porn sites, choose what I like to download (only pics of course), copy the download links and close the connection. Connect again to the ISP forum for free, start a new post on the forum and add attachment from a URLs (the ones I copied before) to the post, click on preview before post and tadaa.. the attachments are now available to download for free.

Gosh I was horny

Used to sneak off and collect condom boxes from shady beaches post school where couples came to do the deed. I dont know... But back then, every condom packet had a nude picture inside. The most grossed out story was when a guy pulled a condom box out of the gutter, washed it, and brought it to the "meet".

Sex stories were the norm. After getting dial-up internet, we used to download 10-second intro clips from porn sites. It was only in our mid teens that we finally got access to VCDs. Although it was only a short while later that we got the real action so the VCDs lost their charm soon enough.

Infinite streaming of porn is great but i do feel bad that the new generation doesnt experience the thrills of simple adventures like we did. Not that they care, i suppose.

My dad showed me porn when I was like 7 years old and he always watched porn at night on vhs and later on the internet. Later on in life he showed me child porn and it has been a literal nightmare since then . Guys, if you have a kid or plan on it, please do your best not to introduce your young ones to porn, I live in constant sorrow and shame. Edit: I should add that my little 9 year old daughter says I'm the best Papa in the world. My wife thinks the world of me but sometimes I'm not the best person I can be, but she sticks with me and I am lucky she does.

When I was 12 I walked to a friends house about a mile away. There was a gas station on the way there so I stopped to get a drink and use the bathroom. Even tho I had lived in the same town pretty much my whole life, i had never stopped at this gas station before, let alone use the bathroom. Well they had a coin machine on the wall and it had a silhouette of a woman with a question mark in front of it. Curious I threw a quarter in there and out popped a single picture of a nude woman. She was a red head with big tits. That was the first "porn" image i ever saw and it is forever ingrained in my memory.

Archie comics - Betty and Veronica in swimsuits.

I think the thing to keep in mind is RESOLUTION. Back when I was coming up, everybody had like max 640x480, so if you got a nice pic, it was almost certainly somewhere around 200x400 px, and you were happy for it and saved in a folder somewhere, as there was only like a 2% chance of ever finding it again because the web back then was just an entirely different thing/place.

When I was a kid and you wanted to find porn you went to the Woods. Always could find some there 😂

Softcore porn movies in the early hours of the morning. The 'previews' on the porn channels five minutes before they switched over to a scrambled feed. A lone VCR tape found in the attic with some erotic novels.

My uncle used to live at home with the family, and was a truck driver. He was a long hauler, out for weeks or months at a time. Well, I discovered his porno stash that he kept in the rig with him, and any time he was back home I would spend all day trying to figure out how I can sneak into the semi and dip out with a VHS. If I did a door check and it was unlocked, it was game on.

I ran off with some good flicks out of this caper, although once I did end up with a granny porno, which for a young 16/17 y.o. lad wasn't really doing it for me. I guess you gotta take an L once in a while.

The good ole' days....when porn came with a sense of risk and adventure. Now it's easier than grabbing than a soft drink.

Also - I know this is stealing, but I was a horny kid....could have done worse.

That 3.5” floppy got your farther than you think. Also nothing is more terrifying than getting that thing stuck in your computer and not being able to get it out or erase it.

Backstory: In the mid to late 90s, we had a computer shop where people did printing jobs like business cards, resumes and occasional DOS games (Lion King!), things like that.

Enterprising 5th grade me used our bubblejet printer to print and sell some to the other boys in class which looking back now was softcore stuff (Erika Eleniak, oh yeah.. Baywatch Pamela Anderson mmm). A female classmate snatched a page in the middle of an exchange and as preppy grade schoolers do, threatened to go to the principal. Remember that this was in nineteen ninety eight when the undertaker threw mankind off hеll in a cell, and plummeted sixteen feet through an announcer's table. I've never been so scared of getting expelled!

My best friends father had a VHS stash under his bed. We were around 12 years old in 1994 and two heterosexual friends watching porn together was better than not watching any porn at all. It wasn't even good porn either, it was terrible late 70/80's porn but we took what we could get. All moustaches and hairy muffs.

Another thing I recall from early teenage years, porno mags found in various places outside. Discarded by truckers or similar. We thought the pages were stuck together because they'd been left out in the rain...

My first internet connection was 28.8k Dial Up. I can remember it taking literally minutes to download a picture. Video porn was pretty much out of the question until ISDN128 (1998); even then that'd would've taken hours to download (a couple minute clip) and the video content wasn't really there until we were into the 2000's anyway.

You kids have it easy these days!

This pretty much explains it:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/05/07

A friend of mine gave me a 300 mb floppy with three 10 second videos on it. It was precious to me.

One was of a woman being fucked with a red snapper fish.

My dad found it and dramatically destroyed it in front of me and my mother.

I felt second hand embarrassment for him as they were divorced already due to his affair with the neighbor.

Early 90's get home from school. Call parents on land line to confirm that they are still at work and use bogus excuse for said call. Commando roll into parents bedroom. Survey room for bugs and line traps. Open closet door with the precision and care of a landmine extraction specialist. Jot down notes on sketch paper of exactly how the porn VHS tapes are sitting in the top of the closet. Another commando roll. Insert VHS tapes into VHS player. Jot down time stamp information on sketch paper so I can rewind the tapes to exactly where they were at when they were started (big thanks to Ferris for this idea). Do the deed. Check notes. Deep breath. Reset time on videos to the exact second. Third commando roll. Check notes. Place videos back perfectly. Finish my homework early with a passion that only early teenage post-masturbation guilt can fuel. Burn sketch paper with a lighter that DOES NOT have a child-proof mechanism.

Edit to address a few questions: My folks were/are pretty square. I was a meticulous porn stealer, but I couldn't really ever address the dust issue. Fingerprints man, its what gets every crook busted. Their stupid porn tape collection was from the early 70's and I am pretty sure they just spent their early adult life scared to death that they would be caught by some nefarious entity if they actually put them in the garbage. Anyways, I learned a lot of stuff from my porn espionage. Funk bass guitar and whatnot.