Some Not-So-Very-Amateur Spanking Action
I was rummaging through my old directories the other day when I found this small trove of vintage spanking photos branded with the watermarks and branding information for the Amateur Action BBS. Amateur Action was one of the many dial-up bulletin board systems (BBS) that predated the modern internet. This one was in California, so it raised quite a stir more than 35 years ago when its owners got sent to jail by federal prosecutors in Tennessee and Utah for violating the much-more-conservative community standards in those distant states.
At one point Amateur Action had more than 25,000 porn images available for download. This may sound quaint and feeble to our modern ears. Any random porn tumblr of a few years ago, now RIP and just a memory, had more than that. Hell, you can find a lot more movies and movie clips than that on large porn sharing sites these days, and comparable numbers on any of them.
But for the times? That was an astonishing trove of digital porn. So much so that, with the consumer-grade modems then available, you’d never scratch the surface of the collection, trying to download them over the phone lines. Thus, many of the BBS of the era had a sideline in selling CD-ROM collections of their stuff through the mail. Most of those CDs were never published in volume, and are either rare or completely lost. (If you have one, I’d love to share its contents with the world! Email me, I beg you.)
The spanking photos in this post were old when I downloaded them from Usenet in (looks at file metadata) 2003. They had been, by then, been swapped around, cropped, uploaded, downloaded, stretched, touched up, sharpened, softened, and generally run through the online file-sharing wringer for at least a decade. In most cases the “originals” on offer from Amateur Action would have been clearer and sharper and possibly larger in dimension than what you see here. But not by so much as you would hope: file dimensions like 640×480 and 800×600 were considered “hi-res” in those days. 1024×768? A file that big was called “wallpaper”!
When I use the word “original” in connection with files from a porn BBS like Amateur Action, it doesn’t mean what you might think. Perhaps these BBS may have distributed “original” scans — meaning they were the ones who created the digital file from its paper-porn source — but they rarely, if ever, created their own porn by hiring models and taking new photographs. Most BBS porn was scanned, quite shamelessly, from paper porn magazines, whether new and contemporary at that time or already vintage. Mind you, all that scanning took prodigious effort: scanners were expensive, slow, and extremely finicky in operation. But it was a lot easier than making your own porn, much to the chagrin of the “real” porn publishers who were actually doing the work of making and selling original images.
If you’ve been around the spanking porn world for long enough, you may be able to identify the spanking magazines these images probably came from. Nu-West was a major publisher and a common “source” for BBS scans that had a spanking theme. But no porn magazine publishers were immune. I don’t personally recognize any of the photos in this post, but it would not shock me to have my readers start identifying magazines, shoots, and models in the comments.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this small nostalgic voyage into the early history of digital spanking porn!
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File 6326 is a picture that is new to me, as is 14650. It is one of the only regrets that I have being that I could have purchased those CD Roms back then, but never did. Spanking companies that no longer exist would sell photo CD’s and I’m sure there is a treasure trove out there somewhere that we are missing out on. I do have a few Nu-West magazines and the girl/girl pics in this post have had some limited run with the high quality version. The photo set with the girl with the red shoes I have posted a few years ago on my pics site, and that set also appears in one of the Nu-West magazines that I have.
Great post. Wish I had a larger version of the first pic to try and identify the girls. I’ve often wondered just had many old, never before seen, photos are rotting away in the Nu-West vaults.
Love those vintage photos. Takes me back to the old BBS days. We had a similar BBS in our NYC area back then called “Aces”
Many of those same photos. Took so long to download over those 1200 modems.
This is fascinating! Some of the fun facts you posted I had forgotten about but remember now (like the designation of “wallpaper” for high-res-at-the-time images). But I had no idea that CD-ROMS were promoted and sold as an alternative to slow-ass downloads–but it makes sense!
I mean, yeah: passionate film buffs continue to use discs in the mail. I’m talking about Netflix. Apparently, their DVD database dwarfs their streaming options, though I only subscribe to the latter. (I’m not talking about porn, though.)
Thanks, everybody, I’m glad you enjoyed this post. An email correspondent reminds me that some of the BBS-era CDs are even more rare than I remembered or stated: some of them were never offered for retail sale, but were distributed commercially within the community of BBS businesses. Somebody would print a CD-ROM of the stuff on their own BBS (with prominent watermarks on every photo) and sell or share it with another BBS on the other side of the country. In many cases the number of copies ever made is likely to be less than a few dozen, not hundreds or thousands. So watch those estate sale and flea market collections of badly-labeled and ancient computer “garbage”!
All except four and five are Nu-West. I did quite a business with them back then and had a lot of the photosets. this is why Ed quit doing the photo sets and once he had some pictures that were download from him only in a forty eight hour period. I lost all those that I lost in a computer crash and it is hard to find them on the web. I was really sad that he quit making photo sets because I did have the money for a scanner and I used them for screen savers. there were quite a few videos that I bought because I saw the stills on A.B.P.E.S.
I do remember the hypocrisy on the site. If someone posted from Nu-west or shadow lane it was great. If Tony Elka posted from Shadow lane, which he and his wife Eve owned, he was a spammer.
I wonder if it had to do with how he posted? I don’t know Tony, but he has been aggressively rude here in the Spanking Blog comments in the past.