I took a lot of photos with a lot of people during the late 90’s. I wonder if those backup CDs in storage are still good.
Assuming that as an older millennial, I’m the parent you’re talking about, no. Porn almost never went on those. VHS and paper magazines mostly. Computer porn would be downloaded to a convoluted folder depth with misleading names on your hard drive, and would never be placed on removable media unless you had a CD burner, which was rare as fuck (but they did exist).
Seriously though, people used to make genuine mazes out of nested folders.
If you were in the era of dial up BBS systems, you still were far more likely to use a hard drive than a floppy. The reason floppies weren’t used is that even at low resolution with still images, not much would fit on the things, super inconvenient. Shareware, sure. Porn? Not likely.
I can confirm the existance of said mazes of nested folders. Also renaming files to have the wrong extension for the file type, to prevent anyone else from finding them.
Windows sold me out by having a “Recently viewed files” section on the start menu that I had not noticed. Luckily, it was my friends that found it and not my parents.
Still, though, being caught red-handed with badly photoshopped fake nudes of Britney Spears was quite embarrassing for teenage me.
I discovered Slackware Linux at the age of 15, which kinda raised the bar for unexpected entry to my collection. But it also prevented myself from perusing it, as I couldn’t get a proper image viewer to work for the first couple of weeks… :-)
