In the spring of 1994 I set about learning HTML, and for practice began turning Mitchell Porter's High Weirdness by E-Mail into HTML. By the fall I'd put what I had on the Web, and called it, modestly, Hyper-Weirdness by World Wide Web. Mitchell had a section of High Weirdness on sex, and without thinking about it at all I included that in HWbW3. I also spun off the section on dirty pictures into a page of its own, called ``nekkid wymmin''. Neither contained anything even vaguely titillating, but they did have links to ``lewd, lascivious, obscene or indecent'' material, and a great many snide comments.
I got mail --- one letter per thousand hits at most. Most of it was from people at Prodigy who couldn't access Usenet. Some of them seemed to take this as a personal affront on my part. Since none of them ever replied, I never figured out if they were clueless or Prodigy restricts access to the sex newsgroups. One person said I ``gave good link.'' Another, of indeterminate sex, said they wanted to have my children. One of them pointed out a hideous breach of netiquette, which I still feel bad about.
In August I was asked to close down, or at least move to another server. This was not, I hasten to add, because of the content, but because the sex pages by themselves were getting 3,000 hits a week, which was a fifth of the total load on the server. So I moved everything to this machine, except for the sex pages, which are closed indefinitely.
Between 26 September 1994 and 13 August 1995, there were 170,029 requests for Hyper-Weirdness by World Wide Web, of which 67,269 either resulted in errors, or file redirections, or were for the table of contents, and 59,065 were for the sex pages. Thus, 57% of all significant requests were for smut. This is an impressive statistic to begin with: but it's far more amusing to look at the breakdown by domain.
Total Sex Horniness (%) Malaysia 189 162 86+-0.5 prodigy.com 3,888 3,322 85+-0.03 Japan 2,025 1,715 85+-0.05 South Korea 118 93 79+-0.8 aol.com 2,212 1,660 75+-0.05 Switzerland 387 283 73+-0.3 Singapore 287 213 74+-0.3 Norway 603 419 69+-0.2 US (.com) 31,118 19,299 62+-0.003 Germany 1,105 684 62+-0.1 Israel 905 556 61+-0.1 Compuserve 2,871 1,727 60+-0.03 US (.mil) 747 451 60+-0.1 Canada 3,813 2,218 58+-0.03 Italy 270 157 58+-0.4 US (all) 63,025 36,116 57+-0.001 France 449 255 57+-0.2 Iceland 116 66 57+-0.9 US (.net) 9,494 5,314 56+-0.01 US (.gov) 1,693 947 56+-0.05 senate.gov 3 2 67+-33 house.gov 34 20 59+-3 whitehouse 0 Denmark 177 99 56+-0.6 Austria 217 114 53+-0.5 US (.edu) 18,753 9,514 51+-0.005 Wisconsin 613 327 53+-0.2 Cal 251 146 58+-0.4 Holland 670 347 52+-0.1 Belgium 276 142 51+-0.3 US (.org) 1,220 581 48+-0.08 Sweden 966 466 48+-0.1 South Africa 234 113 48+-0.4 Spain 116 54 47+-0.9 US (k12) 215 101 47+-0.5 United Kingdom 3,363 1,507 45+-0.03 Australia 2,637 1,166 44+-0.04 Finland 481 201 42+-0.3 Ireland 260 109 42+-0.4 Delphi 143 54 38+-0.7 New Zealand 334 112 34+-0.3 Error >1% Croatia 28 23 82+-4 Indonesia 36 29 81+-3 Kuwait 23 17 74+-4 Estonia 50 35 70+-2 Hong Kong 33 22 67+-3 Greece 98 62 63+-1 Brazil 80 49 61+-1.3 Chile 33 17 52+-3 Mexico 88 45 51+-1.1 Czech Republic 43 15 35+-2 Bermuda 35 14 40+-3 Slovenia 35 14 40+-3 Portugal 35 13 37+-3 Russia 39 10 26+-3 Poland 65 16 25+-2 Taiwan 29 5 17+-3 Error >5% China 7 7 100+-14 Venezuela 3 3 100+-33 Ukraine 2 2 100+-50 Uruguay 2 2 100+-50 Jamaica 2 2 100+-50 Dominican Rep. 1 1 100+-100 Nicaragua 1 1 100+-100 Hungary 16 15 94+-6 Luxembourg 8 5 63+-13 Costa Rica 15 9 60+-7 Turkey 7 4 57+-14 Thailand 15 7 47+-7 Slovakia 11 5 45+-9 Great Britain 17 7 41+-6 Argentina 17 6 35+-6 Philippines 3 1 33+-33 x-Soviet Union 16 2 13+-6 Bulgaria 6 0 0+-17 Ecuador 10 0 0+-10 Peru 5 0 0+-20 Egypt 2 0 0+-50 Latvia 1 0 0+-100[Error-bars are from the ``maximum likelihood'' method of figuring sampling error.]
According to Larry Landweber, ``International Connectivity,'' version 13 (15 Feb. 1995),
Algeria (dz), Antarctica (aq), Armenia (am), Azerbaijan (az), Bahamas (bs), Bangladesh (bd), Barbados (bb), Belarus (by), Belize (bz), Bolivia (bo), Bosnia (ba), Botswana (bw), Burkina Faso (bf), Cameroon (cm), Congo (cg), Cook Islands (ck), Cote d'Ivoire (ci), Cuba (cu), Cyprus (cy), El Salvador (sv), Faroe Islands (fo), Fiji (fj), Georgia (ge), Ghana (gh), Greenland (gl), Grenada (gd), Guam (gu), Guatemala (gt), Guinea (gn), Guyana (gy), Haiti (ht), Iran (ir), Kazakshtan (kz), Kiribati (ki), the Kyrgyz Republic (kg), Lebanon (lb), Lesotho (ls), Liechtenstein (li), Lithuania (lt), Macau (mo), Macedonia (mk), Madagascar (mg), Malawi (mw), Mali (ml), Malta (mt), Marshall Islands (mh), Mauritius (mu),Moldova (md), Monaco (mc), Morocco (ma), Mozambique (mz), Namibia (na), Nauru (nr), Nepal (np), Netherlands Antilles (an), New Caledonia (nc), Niger (ne), Nigeria (ng), Niue (nu), Pakistan (pk), Panama (pa), Papua New Guinea (pg), Paraguay (py), Puerto Rico (pr), Romania (ro), Saint Lucia (lc), Saint Vincent (vc), Samoa (ws), Senegal (sn), Seychelles (sc), Solomon Islands (sb), Sri Lanka (lk), Suriname (sr), Svalbard and Jan Mayen Islands (sj), Swaziland (sz), Tajikistan (tj), Tanzania (tz), Togo (tg), Tonga (to), Trinidad and Tobago (tt), Tunisia (tn), Turkmenistan (tm), Tuvalu (tv), Uzbeikstan (uz), Vanuatu (vu), Vietnam (vn), US Virgin Islands (vi), Yugoslavia (uf), Zambia (zm) and Zimbabwe (zw)all have some from of Internet access, but none of them linked to Hyper-Weirdness.