Event Horizons BBS was a popular and perhaps the most financially successful Bulletin Board System (BBS). It was founded in 1983 by Jim Maxey, a self-taught scientist, [1] who was President and CEO and ran his company out of Lake Oswego, Oregon. [2] By 1993, the BBS was grossing over $3.2 million annually. [3] In 1994, the BBS had 128 phone lines and over 34,000 members, and eighteen employees. [1] [4] The organization also offered mail-ordered copies of content for those that did not want to download said via modem. [5] Event Horizons in later years ran on the TBBS system. [6] In 1996, Maxey closed the BBS.
Event Horizons BBS originally offered online forums, games, and astronomy images [1] [7] for paying customers to download. Maxey first charged $1/hr which grew over the years to $24/hr. The BBS later offered softcore adult images and movies which helped to secure its fame as the most profitable BBS. [8] A team of programmers working for the BBS created an interactive, graphical game called Voyager III that allowed the players to explore space. [1] [7]
In 1992, Playboy Enterprises sued Event Horizons for copyright infringement. Maxey reportedly paid Playboy a half million dollars to settle the case out of court in 1993. [9] [10] The BBS complied with copyright law in the wake of the settlement. [11]
A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS), was a computer server running software that allowed users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.
Erotica is literature or art that deals substantively with subject matter that is erotic, sexually stimulating or sexually arousing. Some critics regard pornography as a type of erotica, but many consider it to be different. Erotic art may use any artistic form to depict erotic content, including painting, sculpture, drama, film or music. Erotic literature and erotic photography have become genres in their own right. Erotica also exists in a number of subgenres including gay, lesbian, women's, bondage, monster and tentacle erotica.
Playboy is an American men's lifestyle and entertainment magazine, formerly in print and currently online. It was founded in Chicago in 1953, by Hugh Hefner and his associates, funded in part by a $1,000 loan from Hefner's mother.
Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer. Shareware is often offered as a download from a website. Shareware differs from freeware, which is fully-featured software distributed at no cost to the user but without source code being made available; and free and open-source software, in which the source code is freely available for anyone to inspect and alter.
In a bulletin board system (BBS), a door is an interface between the BBS software and an external application. The term is also used to refer to the external application, a computer program that runs outside of the main bulletin board program. Sometimes called external programs, doors are the most common way to add games, utilities, and other extensions to BBSes. Because BBSes typically depended on the telephone system, BBSes and door programs tended to be local in nature, unlike modern Internet games and applications.
Pornographic magazines or erotic magazines, sometimes known as adult magazines or sex magazines, are magazines that contain content of an explicitly sexual nature. Publications of this kind may contain images of attractive naked subjects, as is the case in softcore pornography, and, in the usual case of hardcore pornography, depictions of masturbation, oral, manual, vaginal, or anal sex.
The Major BBS was bulletin board software developed between 1986 and 1999 by Galacticomm. In 1995 it was renamed Worldgroup Server and bundled with a user client interface program named Worldgroup Manager for Microsoft Windows. Originally DOS-based, two of the versions were also available as a Unix-based edition, and the last versions were also available for Windows NT-based servers.
Rusty n Edie's BBS (Rusty-N-Edie's) was a bulletin board system founded on May 11, 1987 by the two SysOps, Russell & Edwina Hardenburgh, of Boardman, Ohio. At one point the BBS had over 14,000 subscribers across the United States, Canada, and Europe and over 124 modem lines.
ExecPC is an online service provider started in 1983 by owner Bob Mahoney as the Exec-PC BBS. It quickly grew to be one of the world's largest bulletin board systems in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, competing with the likes of Compuserve and Prodigy.
LView Pro (LVP) is a bitmap graphics editor for computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system developed by Leonardo H. Loureiro, who owns the copyright to the software and the LView registered trademark. LView Pro is distributed by CoolMoon Corp.
Pornography has been defined as sexual subject material "such as a picture, video, or text" that is intended for sexual arousal. Indicated for the consumption by adults, pornography depictions have evolved from cave paintings, some forty millennia ago, to virtual reality presentations. A general distinction of adult content is made classifying it as pornography or erotica.
Boardwatch Magazine, informally known as Boardwatch, was initially published and edited by Jack Rickard. Founded in 1987, it began as a publication for the online Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s and 1990s and ultimately evolved into a trade magazine for the Internet service provider (ISP) industry in the late 1990s. The magazine was based in Lakewood, Colorado, and was published monthly.
There has been demand for imagery of nude celebrities for many decades. It is a lucrative business exploited by websites and magazines.
Cyberethics is the philosophic study of ethics pertaining to computers, encompassing user behavior and what computers are programmed to do, and how this affects individuals and society. For years, various governments have enacted regulations while organizations have defined policies about cyberethics.
Usenet, USENET, or "in full", User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.
Internet pornography is any pornography that is accessible over the Internet; primarily via websites, FTP connections, peer-to-peer file sharing, or Usenet newsgroups. The greater accessibility of the World Wide Web from the late 1990s led to an incremental growth of Internet pornography, the use of which among adolescents and adults has since become increasingly popular.
Monochrome BBS, known to users as "Mono," is a text-based multi-user bulletin board system featuring thousands of discussion files, along with games, user messaging, and a talker. As of November 2023 it is one of the few BBS's still in operation and actively used on a daily basis by its community. Monochrome runs on custom software, making the platform and user experience distinct from other bulletin board systems.
Playboy Enterprises, Inc. v. Frena, 839 F.Supp. 1552 (1993) was a copyright infringement case decided by the United States District Court for the Middle District of Florida, holding that the unauthorized online distribution of copied photographs was copyright infringement; and that removing a magazine's trademark from copied images was trademark infringement.
Novell, Inc. v. Reimerdes was a federal civil action, "inter alia", under the Copyright and Trademark Laws of the United States.