The fine people over at Kink Craft have a podcast about Erotic Video Games (do go and listen, they are great folks) and while I haven’t listened yet (I promise I will) it got me thinking about my personal history of tech and sex. I think I might have been one of the few people with access to computers in the 70’s. My school had a remote terminal connection to a mainframe computer at the local College and since my father was a programmer for GE everyone assumed I knew how to do it too. So I was drafted from my health class to assist in writing a computer dating program for all the kids in all the health classes.
For the life of me I can’t remember what on earth this had to do with learning about health but I didn’t care, getting to play with a computer was much more interesting than sitting in a classroom being mocked by my peers. So off I went with another student (who went on to be an actual programmer) and we spent the entire semester coding this 30 question dating profile matcher, that I rigged to match me with girls that I secretly liked in hopes that since the computer said we were a match that they might take the time to get to know me. That did not turn out as I expect as the results were read aloud to the sounds of those girls going “Ewww”
Never the less I was left with a profound interest in technology and many years later with the dawn of BBS and home computing I built my first PC from scavenged parts including a smoking fast 300 baud modem that let me dial into BBS system and explore. Boy did I find some eye opening stuff. People wrote stories and encoded picture (that you had to download first to see what they were) and even the beginning of chat.
Flash forward a few years and several PC builds later and I was connecting to Compuserve, and AOL, and Prodigy with my blazing fast 14.4k speed and read about Teledildonics and programmable vibrators. Why even Wired magazine had a sex tech columnist (fired as soon as Conde Nast bought the mag) and I was playing Leisure Suit Larry and not getting laid there either.
The point of all of this ramble is, that from my early High School days I have been involved as a user of technology for sexual purposes. It has been an exciting and fascinating journey from that early and crude tech that enable so much of my life, not the least of which is meeting Molly online and living together through technology. But we have really just scratched the tip of the iceberg in what we can do in all manner of relationships using technology. While I think some of the current trends will fizzle and die, just as some of what we used to do has, some of it will transform the way we live and love and that will be thrilling to watch.
Because you can’t stop change no matter how much you’d like too.
Michael
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