Porn has come a long way before it came on the web.
Pornography is often regarded as one of the driving force behind the massive expansion of the World Wide Web, and even before than, it has come a long way. On the early internet days, pornographic images were transmitted through ASCII, but to send an actual image, people need computers with graphic capabilities and better network bandwidth. This was possible in the late 1980s when people were able to use anonymous FTP servers through Gropher's protocol.
One of the early Gopher/FTP sites that was called the Digital Archive on the 17th Floor, has a small image archive that contained some low quality scanned pornographic images that were initially available to anyone anonymously. But since internet was still mainly mainly used for academic research and for military network, porn actually didn't exist yet.
After the first ever photo was uploaded on the internet, the activity of uploading and downloading images came up rapidly. But since transfer speed was limited, the size and quality were significantly lowered.
The first porn materials that were uploaded on purpose, were scanned from adult magazines. Around that time, Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) were used, leading them to be the first place for commercial online pornography. At the height, the BBS industry had more than 45,000 BBSs in the United States alone, generating $100 million revenue a year, at a time when almost nobody was online.
It was in 1994 when Gary Kremen registered sex.com, the first regarded porn domain. But it was Stephen Cohen who saw the potential of the domain. So he contacted Network Solutions, which administrated all domain names back then, and fraudulently take the ownership of domain using a series of fake faxes and forged documents. After acquiring it, he quickly turned it to something profitable.