Hello and welcome back! This is episode two of my new series so, if you haven’t seen/heard/read the first one, make sure you do that since that first episode was pretty much all set-up, but important set-up. Now, though, it’s time to really get into it.

Starting with that very first photo set that Dave posted to the Usenet newsgroups, he chose to use the name “JEN n DAVE,” putting my name first because as he’s said many times before, he knew that people were coming to see me, even if he was the wizard behind the curtain. (That last part is my words… he would just say that he knew they weren’t coming to see him.)

The next few months, we were still going to work, but spending all of our free time shooting photos and trying to keep up with the ever-growing onslaught of messages and emails.

Before long, we became overwhelmed with requests to repost this picture or that in the “JNSHRP” series. Dave started adding a note to our weekly postings that said something to the effect of, “Please don’t ask us to repost photos. We don’t have time.”

Finally, we received a message from someone suggesting that we start a webpage where we could archive all the photos and let people download them that way.

That seemed like a fantastic solution to the problem, so Dave quickly figured out how to make a simple website and on October 1, 1995, Fantasy by Mariah Carey was the #1 song on the charts, and “JEN n DAVE’s Homepage!” was officially born.

Between then and February of ’96, it was an almost constant dance of moving servers, setting up “mirror” pages, and more, to try and keep it up and running. Every server we got on was overloaded almost immediately.

One of the most reliable was a company called Concentric. They were offering free UNLIMITED webspace with a dial-up account. Perfect, right?

Then the emails from them started. We learned the term “bandwidth” and how they were not happy about how much we were using.

We went back and forth with them, arguing, “Well, you said it was unlimited!” They’d reply, yeah, but you’re having 20,000 unique visitors a day, and using whatever amount of bandwidth we were using then, and that was not what they had intended with this offer. We’d ask, well, what did you intend? Unlimited but to a limit?

In the end, they shut us down and stopped offering “unlimited” free web space.

Frankly, the latter action is a source of pride for me. A whole-ass company changed how they did things because of how much people wanted to see my boobies.

Dave then found a guy who went by the name “Izzy” who lived in Philadelphia and had a small web-hosting company. We signed up with him and, since we were now paying for webspace, we decided to take the suggestion we had received from several fans, and opened up a P.O. Box to accept donations.

When we first started posting, I was working as a receptionist for a small law office down in the city, but by then I was working as a receptionist for a pension plan administrator in Towson. On my lunch break, I would walk over to the post office, check the box, grab whatever was inside, and then walk down to the Subway on the corner of York and Chesapeake to get something to eat.

Sometimes I’d just stay there, but most of the time I would walk back up to spend the remainder of my lunch break on one of the benches in the gardens outside the old Towson Courthouse. There I would eat and check out what people had sent us.

Most sent cash. Some even sent money from other countries that we didn’t know what to do with (but was cool all the same). It wasn’t much but it did help pay our server bills.

Then something happened that changed our lives and the internet itself forever… even though the law itself was pretty quickly struck down.

On February 8, 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act. It was the first attempt by the U.S. government to “crackdown” on internet pornography.

Everybody posting adult content back then, and more importantly Izzy, told us we would have to do something to keep minors from accessing our photos.

Dave found a service called “First Virtual” that was perhaps the first e-commerce facilitator available to the general public. It worked a lot like PayPal, where you would put money into your First Virtual account, and then you could use those funds to pay for things online.

At that time, minors generally did not have credit cards. Yes, they could steal their parent’s cards but that wouldn’t be our fault. Requiring a credit card showed that we were trying to do something to keep kids out.

We still had no intentions of turning this into an actual business. We were simply trying to limit access and possibly help cover the bills for this little hobby of ours. I knew that people liked looking at my photos but I didn’t think anybody would actually PAY to see them. Maybe a couple of people…

We started charging $5 for 6 months of access to our weekly updates and $10 for 3 months of access to the entire archive. We were also trying to limit bandwidth. Bandwidth was a big issue back in the day.

When we made $20,000 in the first 3 weeks alone, I had to admit that perhaps I had underestimated myself, as well as this whole internet thing.

Now, we did not get that money right away. I was ready to go in and quit my job immediately when those first numbers started coming in… but, then we found out that First Virtual would hold the funds for 90 days.

Dave insisted that we could not be irresponsible and just quit our jobs until this money started actually showing up in our bank account. We weren’t even entirely sure this wasn’t just a big scam or something. We didn’t know anybody who had ever bought or sold things online at the time. Again, it just wasn’t a thing yet.

So, I understood his point; I just wasn’t happy about it. Up until then, I had done my best at my job, like I always did. Even if I hated my job (I always hated my jobs), I would take pride in my own work while I was there.

I have to admit that I started slacking off a bit, though, when I knew it was just a matter of time before I would be getting more money than I had ever seen in my life.

I still don’t think I was bad enough to get fired but around mid-June, they said they were letting me go. They sent me off with a very nice severance package, making it clear that everybody still liked me personally, but my performance had dropped below “acceptable levels.” Nevertheless, I was burning with shame on the bus ride home.

I was soon comforted, though, because less than a week later, that first deposit came through. I would have been quitting anyway, so really it worked out for the best. “Thanks for the bonus I wouldn’t have received if you had waited even a week longer to get rid of me!”

It was so unbelievable. There may still be a video somewhere, probably in a cardboard box on a VHS, of me counting out a whole ton of cash like I was in a rap video. I just couldn’t help myself.

Before long, we had enough money for Dave to quit his job, too. What I didn’t know at the time was how conflicted he felt.

This may be difficult for some to understand but he had started doing this as a way of participating in a community of body-positive and sex-positive people, even if those terms hadn’t been invented yet.

As for me, I was just kind of along for the ride. I admired Dave’s moral compass, which he says only developed after we started doing porn.

When we started charging, though, he received some messages from people calling us “sell-outs” and accusing us of planning this all along. As I’ve since learned over many years, hell hath no fury like someone getting charged for something they had been getting for free.

He kept all this from me for some time and it sounds ridiculous now, but Dave took it to heart a bit too much. He did everything he could to keep our site as “pure” as possible.

Age-verification sites started popping up, and we signed up for them, too, figuring that we would give people as many options as possible. All we wanted to do was post our pics and not get in trouble for it. The money was just a nice bonus.

At least that’s the way Dave thought. I wasn’t quite as opposed to making money but again, I was pretty much on board with whatever he thought was right. While a bit naive and idealistic, I still think the general attitude we had about this back then was admirable.

We very famously did not have recur billing on our site for many years. We had heard too many stories of people not being able to cancel and we had even experienced it ourselves with Hustler in their very early days, so we didn’t even offer recur-billing for the longest time. We didn’t want people sending us money unless they were making the conscious choice to do so – not because they had trouble canceling or just forgot. I never wanted to be responsible for someone getting an overdraft fee or anything like that. We probably did lose money but it was something we felt very strongly about at the time.

We continued our weekly postings but rejected all forms of advertising. We had a very coveted list of links, but it was only people we actually liked or thought had a legitimately good website. If people linked back to us, great, but it wasn’t required.

One of the first things we did when the money started coming in was to buy a car: A green ‘96 Saturn SL2. (Green has always been my favorite color.)

We could have paid cash for it had we taken just a tiny bit of time to save up, but being the impulsive young people that we were, we decided to finance it so we could get it right away.

Of course, trying to prove our income to the finance company was a challenge. They did not understand what we meant by, “we make money on the internet.”

We managed to get through it, though, and just like in the commercials of the day, the whole staff at the Saturn dealership came out to clap and send us on our way in our new car!

Now I didn’t have to haul our laundry onto the #8 bus, down to the closest laundromat. We even took a couple of impromptu road trips that summer.

We first drove to Houston, TX where Dave had lived for a year or two before we met. We made several stops along the way including Jacksonville, Biloxi, and New Orleans. We didn’t even think to shoot photos. We were just out having fun.

The same for when Dave got it in his head to take a trip up to Detroit to see the Orioles break some kind of record, which they were likely to break while playing there. That trip is when I realized that, while it’s still pretty warm in September in Maryland, not so much the further north you go. The first thing we did when getting there was ask the hotel desk where we could go to buy clothes. We were freezing in our T-shirts and shorts. I bought some jeans and a blue flannel shirt because the grunge look was still in.

Despite the trips and all, though, we continued our posting schedule, but started to change some things up. For one, digital cameras were starting to become available and semi-affordable. I think the first digital camera we bought was $800 and looking back the quality was terrible – the max resolution I believe was 320x240. However, it was amazing at the time and a total game changer in how we could take photos. In the past, we had to be careful with how many shots we took because we only had so many per roll of film, but now if you took a bad shot, no harm no foul – just delete it and try again.

However, due to the quality issues, we still stuck with shooting most of our photos on 35mm for quite some time. We eventually ditched Seattle FilmWorks and bought a scanner. We even invested in a really nice 35mm. We also got in good with the people at our local Rite-Aid photo counter. The first set of photos we took there were just some of me on our bed, with nothing but some clean white sheets and various flowers I picked up at the grocery store. I think it drew their attention because they were different from the usual naughty photos they might see in their work. Dave had gotten better at photography and, while we certainly had our more X-rated photos, as well, these at least appeared classier than the usual blurry shots of private parts that usually came out of the photo developing machine.

Of course, as I mentioned in the last episode, I did have one very embarrassing incident at that counter. While all the employees came to know and like us – as Dave likes to say, it was like the aisles parted when we would come in with new rolls of film to develop – at one point, a new girl started working there and she kind of gave off the air of being a bit prudish. I was already nervous walking up there one day to pick up photos because she was the only one there and when she told me that she couldn’t develop the photos, I started explaining, “We come in here all the time and develop these same kinds of photos. These aren’t even that explicit…” She then stopped me and said no, we just can’t develop these particular rolls of film.

I had forgotten that we had some old rolls from Seattle FilmWorks laying around and used them when we ran out of the normal ones that we would usually buy there at that Rite-Aid. Seattle FilmWorks did something to their rolls of film so that they couldn’t be developed by anyone but them. It had been a while since we had dealt with that and it had just slipped my mind. I was so embarrassed and apologetic. In my anxiousness, I had turned total “Karen” on her (even though that was another term that was still many years off from being coined), and I could not have felt more shame. I’m not like that. I go out of my way to not be like that. But everyone has their moments…

Anyway, I think it was probably somewhere around the turn of the century that digital cameras evolved to the point that we felt comfortable going fully digital. We held out a bit because of the quality issues but digital was just so easy and cost-effective.

Well, sort of – I think the next couple of digital cameras we bought were in the $1,000 range. I even ruined one in 2001 when I had both the camera and a water bottle in my purse and it leaked all over it. Oops. However, in general, they were just the more efficient way of shooting photos for the site.

We were still using 35mm when we started meeting with other people, though. Meeting people through the internet was another thing that was still very much in its infancy and was scary as hell. Dave started emailing with some of these other adult webmasters, though, and the first one we met was a guy who ran a site called, “The Art of Wetness.” He also lived in Baltimore and we ended up shooting photos with him and one of his models in the basement studio of his rowhouse.

The model’s name was “Raven.” Probably not her real name. Dave and I were anomalies in the industry as nobody else used their real names online. Honestly, we had just never considered using stage names. If anything, I wanted people to know my real name, because I was proud of what I was doing. However, there are a lot of reasons people choose stage names and Raven may or may not have been using one. Before you think it was inspired by the Baltimore Ravens, though, this was before the Ravens existed.

Raven was very quiet but cool. I was so nervous and I think she might’ve been, too. We didn’t do anything explicit. Just some shots of taking off our clothes, posing together. I think the most intimate thing we did was she brushed my hair for some photos… while naked, of course.

We barely spoke two words to each other and it was kind of nerve-wracking, but it wasn’t a bad introduction to shooting with other people.

It was definitely a step forward, though. A much needed one at that. As 1997 was nearing an end, the income from the site had dwindled to the point that I went to Dave one day and told him, I didn’t know how we were going to make next month’s rent. By this time, we had moved to a new, bigger apartment in the county: Specifically, a little town called Cockeysville about 7 miles north of the city limits. The rent was $800/month at that time and when we moved in, that was no big deal, but now… the internet was sprouting up all around us and with Dave’s “no commercialization” approach to running the site, we were quickly being buried.

So, it was around October of ‘97 – just about two years after we first launched the site – that I took over. Dave got a job at the local Pizza Hut, delivering pizzas. I asked him to show me the very basics of running the site and how to code html. There were different WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) editors but they weren’t very good and I got comfortable right away with just coding the html by hand using nothing but notepad.

I would go around to other websites and if I liked the design or some element of the design, I would click “view source,” copy-paste the code, and tweak it for my own purposes. This was how I learned html, css, javascript.

Usually I just used pieces to make up my own design but there was one time that I copied a bit too much. Asia Carrera was another big internet pioneer in the day. She wasn’t an “amateur” as she had already starred in tons of professional pornographic films but she was very personable on her site and had a very cool design.

She rightfully called me out on it when I met her at the very first porno convention we ever attended in 1998. She wasn’t nasty about it and she was even very gracious while posing for a picture with Dave. I had a difficult time with the camera as I was usually on the other side of it and it was the fancier 35mm that I had not used before, so it took a few tries to get the actual pic, but we finally got it, said thank you, and goodbye… and then I went home and immediately changed up our site so it looked nothing like hers. That aside, though, I take no small amount of pride in the fact that I took our site, which was quickly dying, and turned it around so that it was profitable enough that, well let’s just say, Dave didn’t have to deliver pizzas anymore.

That’s probably a good place to stop for now but there’s still so much more. If anything, this story is STILL just getting started. I haven’t gotten to any of the crazy stuff yet.

I hope you’ve been enjoying it so far, though! If you have, please like, subscribe, all that good stuff – tell me in the comments what you think or if you have any questions – and see you next week!

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