Before there was Only Fans or Porn Hub or any of the other thousands of adult sites, before there was even an internet, there were adult BBSs [1]. There were hundreds of these, but one of the most well known, and certainly one of the best designed, was called SEXTEX.
Introduced in late 1984, SEXTEX was the brain child of adult magazine publisher Gloria Leonard. If you’re reading this you probably don’t need an introduction to Ms Leonard, but even if you are fully aware of her career as an adult film actress and director, and even if you were already aware that she also was the publisher of High Society, you might not be aware that in 1983 she “invented” another sex craze that also utilized phone lines: Phone Sex. But that’s another story for another post.
In December 1984 an announcement was printed in that months PC World, which at the time was a major mainstream tech magazine, probably on par with the NY Times in it’s importance in the tech sector. But right there in the stayed pages of PC World is an announcement that High Society Magazine was introducing “the nation’s first erotic online service.” It went on to itemize the features, including “Nationwide multi-user ‘chatting’, e-mail, personals, conferencing, shopping, Dear Gloria Leonard, sigs [2], games, travel, reviews & more.” All this for a “$65 fee plus $11 per hour of online time” [3]
And this wasn’t any rink-dink fly-by-night setup. The “company” behind SEXTEX was called CVS Online, and was of course a subsidiary of High Society. But High Society was of course not a technology company, so they entered into an arrangement where the service provider Delphi would build and host the SEXTEX BBS [4] Delphi would go on to be one of the first, and for a time one of the largest, dial-up internet providers in the early 1990s. And actually Delphi is still around [5], although nothing like what it was back in the 1980s, or even 1990s.
And that $65 fee is curious, because by 1986 SEXTEX was advertising a “Lifetime Membership” for just $12. That’s probably due to the intense competition that arose over the year or so since SEXTEX’s launch, but if I’d had shelled out $65 I’d be wanting some extra something-something from High Society…
So what was the SEXTEX experience like? Well, we have that base covered, at least in part, courtesy of the good old US Gubment and the Meese Report. Right there, in a footnote at the bottom of page 368 of the 1986 Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, Final Report we find a transcript of two online sessions, unedited, in all it’s raunchy glory!
- BBS – Bulletin Board System, these were computers that you had to dial directly in to using the modem attached to your computer (not just PC, this was for C64s, Atari Computers, Sinclairs, almost all computers had this capability, IF you could afford a modem. We’re not bitter at all…[↑]
- SIGS – we had to look this one up, SIGS stands for Special Interest Groups, at least we think that’s what it meant in BBS Land.[↑]
- But a $65 fee? And $11 per hour? We threw those numbers at our Research Marmosets and they came back with that being the equivalent of $196 and $33 respectively. We’re not familiar with what Only Fans costs, but we’re pretty sure that would go a long way even there today![↑]
- Evidently SEXTEX was modeled exactly on Delphi’s normal, mainstream BBS service, up to the point that the documentation for each was almost identification.[↑]
- https://www.delphiforums.com/[↑]
