[gravitas]

I joke with friends that the internet was invented by porn coders - back in the 90s, porn companies would pay college kids to deliver more porn faster, cheaper (with perl). Before that it was porn BBSes doing the same thing, people would pay for dialup access to download. Porn delivery has been on the forefront of pushing certain areas of tech for a long time, it's just not openly acceptable.

[ghaff]

You go back a ways and that was certainly a trope and there was some truth to it. Pre-ISPs for the general public, even commercial private BBSs that were discussion boards and file distribution points for lots of non-porn purposes, definitely had a big porn part and it wouldn't surprise me if that's what drove most of their subscriptions.