It was called Teletext, and it was a product of the '70s and '80s (if the color scheme wasn't enough of an indicator). If you had the required decoder on your TV, you could receive text and text art over unused television spectrum -- it's how closed captioning works, basically. However, the most efficient use of this amazing technology was, of course, the advertising of boner-causing services. In Europe (especially Germany, as you may have guessed), Teletext ran shitloads of advertisements for phone sex hotlines apparently staffed by Sierra game characters. The flashing, colorful light pixels conjured up images of vaguely female sex partners while presumably killing every lonely epileptic in the continent.

And yes, they actually worked. Real people saw those things and said, "Holy crap, gotta get me some of that blocky action."

dangerousminds.net

theverge.com
There were also non-sex-related messages, like these innocent shoe ads.

All of this was going on a full ten years before the World Wide Web became a thing, which is quite impressive. Even more interesting is the degree to which Teletext has not changed in the years since its birth. Although most major broadcasters have dropped the system, since it's not compatible with digital television, there are still people using it. And the sex ads look exactly as they did in 1983. So if you have any older European relatives who refuse to get rid of their archaic TVs, well, you may have now learned more about them than you ever wanted to.

Before the internet trained us to become aroused by pixels, porn used to come in magazine form ... and it was awful, you guys. Aside from the obvious holding the magazine / touching your junk conundrum, the contents were often so seedy that buying an issue would usually net you a bountiful harvest of clinical-textbook-level vagina photographs. It was probably a relief to some, then, when the first issue of Future Sex was published in 1992. "At last," porn connoisseurs cried, "a magazine with some production values!"

Future Sex
"Wire-frame dildos?! Where do I sign?"

Aimed at the internet-savvy, Future Sex billed itself as your cool robotic aunt -- "creative, offbeat, kinky, goofy, pro-sex." In reality, however, the magazine was exactly as futuristically sexy as being ninja-starred in the junk by a DVD of The Lawnmower Man. Sandwiched between the unflattering boob and penis shots were painfully awkward thinkpieces ...

Future Sex
We now know, of course, that it's both.

... stories about dickin' in the future that make Fifty Shades Of Grey look like Lady Chatterley's Lover by comparison ...

Future Sex
Porn mag graphic or Nine Inch Nails booklet art?

... coverage of some guy whose dick has its own blog ...

Future Sex
"In the future, everyone's dick will be famous for 15 minutes."

... and the piece de resistance: a vision of what cybersex might look like one day, courtesy of some designers who have never seen genitals or experienced any kind of sexual arousal.

Future Sex
If there are any insights to be gained from this, it's that Oculus Rift could have been way more uncomfortable.

The magazine covers in general resemble the sort of manic hallucinations that Harlan Ellison might have experienced if he'd taken a tab of LSD right before watching Showtime After Dark.

Future Sex
Whatever their designer was being paid, it was either too much or too little.

If you're confused about why Future Sex wasn't able to last beyond a phenomenal seven issues before collapsing like a black hole made from floppy penises, what can we say? The advertisers obviously weren't bringing in the dough. However, it's debatable whether that's down to the magazine itself or the fact that the ad copy was nothing beyond the sort of cybersex puns that we all made in high school.

Space Coast Software
Those prices are appalling. They couldn't charge $10 less to include the number "69"?

If this sounded like too much of a hassle (or more likely, you were too dumb to make it work), you could always settle for the vast sea of erotic stories at your disposal. A good chunk of Usenet was devoted to simple .txt files about everything from vanilla husband-wife sex to lesbian urination adventures. You can still visit "alt.sex.stories" today and enter search terms to look at, for example, the first pioneers to write online pony erotica.

Usenet
"We didn't know. Dear God, we didn't know."

Retailing at $29.95 (or $82 with inflation), Softporn Adventure placed you in the shoes of an average guy trawling bars, casinos, and strip clubs in the hope of finding somewhere to stick it before succumbing to his obvious mental illness. Presumably because they expected players to have whacked themselves into a near-unconscious delirium by the opening screen, the game is ridiculously easy to play, even by the standards of a genre in which the most complicated task you'll ever endure is dropping an ax. In fact, the most mentally challenging aspect of Softporn Adventure is customizing the color, flavor, and ribbed-ness of your condom loadout.

On Line Systems
Not a joke.

There's no pictures, but that's where this game comes into its own. It's such a powerfully erotic script that you don't need graphics, what with all the vivid imagery bukkaking in your mind's eye.

For instance, take this saucy scene, wherein you're spying on someone through a peephole:

On Line Systems
"Dammit, I wanted to see if she was gonna make a hot dog."

Or the scene in which you hate-fuck a sex doll into oblivion:

On Line Systems
Usually we're the ones rushing out of the room after farting.

Like we said, it's powerfully erotic material. That feeling of griminess is just ... a side effect. If you're an action fan, this doesn't mean that there's nothing for you. After all, there's the adrenaline-fueled sequence in which you get robbed by a hooker and face the choice of starvation or 48 Hours-ing yourself out of a bondage rope.

On Line Systems
Weird way to reveal the character is an anthropomorphic turkey.

Thankfully, the game doesn't end by forcing you to write an existential despair-filled suicide note. In what must be the most controversial video game ending that isn't Mass Effect 3's, your character manages to romance someone into sharing whatever lifetime he has left after his undiagnosed venereal diseases kick into action.

On Line Systems
Can't "keep it up" because you never got it there.

Truth be told, it was a pretty good system. It was expensive, thanks to the pay-by-the-minute charges, but there was no chance of anyone being phished or hacked or scammed ... unless you count the fact that most users (who were guys) were actually talking to the employees of Minitel (other guys), not some busty mademoiselle gazing wistfully out of her chateau window. But if anything, that confirms that it was ahead of its time.

And for the, like, cinq people left in France who didn't know what they were missing out on, the adverts sure as hell gave them a good idea:

Ulla

Ulla
Though this is France, so even toothpaste has ads like these.

Minitel was eventually withdrawn in 2012, after everyone realized that they could now climax at a speed higher than 0.1 Mbps. Still, that means that there would have been plenty of demand for The Joy Of Cybersex, an informative how-to guide that puts the "D" in "CD-ROM." When it was released in 1993, it quietly delighted frustrated fathers everywhere with its in-depth knowledge about adult bulletin boards, slang, sexy video games, and -- as they called it -- "future sex and teledildonics."

BradyGames

BradyGames
Above: the definition of cybersensual.

Frankly, we don't even know what the point of this fancy futuristic technology is if we can't dress up like Robocop's creepy uncle and pipe 1996's Playboy: Girls Of The Internet into our virtual reality headset.