Almost invariably, when a new girl walks on a Dogfart set, that’s the question. Fans ask a lot, too. Like most questions, there’s a long answer and a short answer…and a wrong answer.

The most-common wrong answer I’ve heard is, “it’s the owner’s nickname”.

The short answer is my boss named his affiliate program — as well as his network of individual websites — after a dude who started posting IR sex pics on the newsgroups in 1995. Dude had a lot of fans on certain newsgroups, and dude’s newsgroup handle was Dogfart.

And here’s the long answer, for those who really wanna know:

So it’s 1995, and you’ve just upgraded your modem from a 9.6 to the newest, fastest one available. It’s a 14.4, and it set you back almost $300 bucks. Plug your telephone line into into it, and you’re set! Since you’re not expecting any important phone calls, you’re psyched to jump online. And even if you did…who gives a fuck! Let them get the busy signal. You’re ready to use the internet for the greatest thing it was never intended for — jerkin’!

No more driving to a sleazy adult stores to rent a VHS tape, and, better yet, no more revealing your kink to the dude behind the counter.

But wait. I’m getting ahead of myself.

If you’re on the internet in the mid-90’s, you’re probably on your America Online account; but, if you’re  a savvy surfer, you’re laughing at the AOL suckers…and you’re using your modem to dial up to one of the lesser-known ISPs and launching one of four applications: mIRC (a popular live chat software), Netscape (the most popular browser of the day), GOPHER (I dunno what software you used to connect to the GOPHER system), and NewsBin (the most popular software for the Usenet newsgroups).

Since I never owned nor operated a “Web TV” device, I have no idea what that was all about. Nor can I really comment on GOPHER, because I never used it either…but from what I remember, GOPHER was the fast and easy way to avoid getting into your car to go to the library to look up stuff…whether you wanted to see if a book was available or look up information to use in your book report.

IRC was a creep show. I know; I was there. I used IRCNet for a short time, and no matter what “channel” I entered (none of which were adult-themed), some creeper immediately wanted to know my sex/age/location. I preferred chatting on my AOL account; somehow, I felt better (safer?) on AOL — instead of the very scary, wide-open, anything-goes internet relay chat.

Netscape Navigator, for a while, was the shit. It was “fast”, it looked cool, and just saying something like, dude, I love the latest version of Nav! meant you scored all sorts of Cool Points with your web surfin’ pals. (I just had to Google “what happened to Netscape” to learn AOL paid 4 billion+ for Netscape Communications (in 1998) before it finally died (in 2007). Then, AOL, as an ISP, pretty much “died” a few years later.)

Which leads us to the Newsgroups — and Mr. Dogfart himself. Before I blab about either, I went to Wiki for a hard definition: “A Usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations using Internet.”

Which is to say, I suppose, that Newsgroups, in the mid-90’s, were kinda like Reddit is now — virtual discussion groups — and if you had an ISP that offered ALL the newsgroups (I think, it their hey day, there was over 24,000 newsgroups — AOL offered maybe 5000, if that…and NONE of the really dirty ones), you could find discussions/pictures on almost anything you could think of.

Here’s a list of the some popular Usenet groups, circa 1995:
alt.society.liberalism
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.amateur
alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.traci-lords
alt.binaries.warez.quebec-hackers
alt.politics.bush
alt.smokers.cigars
alt.atheism
alt.politics

“Binaries” meant pictures. “Warez” were usually hacked software licenses. And there was a newsgroup called “alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.interracial”, and it was ruled by a dude who posted IR sex photos under the name “Dogfart”. Whenever Dogfart posted his latest set of pics, the group hummed. People praised Dogfart, his work…and they begged for more.

And now, with that intro, I’ll let the man himself tell you the rest of the story…in his words. (I’m quoting from an e-mail DF just sent to me):

It was around mid 90’s, and I got a new computer. Back then, to get online, you needed to do AOL through dialup, they (commercial computer makers) even had the AOL software already installed on the computer. The first thing you run into is you need a unique screen name. I started trying everything I thought would be cool, and they were already all taken.

I was getting frustrated since this was all new to me. After awhile, my mother’s dog, that we were watching while she was away, just came into the room, sat down next to me, and ripped a big Silent-But-Deadly fart! Out of frustration, I punched in dogfart, and it got accepted. It was locked in after that.

I always wanted to be a pornographer, in my youth I did detailed porn drawings, and when the VHS era came about, I was always at the video store in the back room loading up on videos. After getting the computer, I found they came out with an external capturing device called “the Snappy”, and when hooked up to my VCR, I could create my own porn pics from the rented porn tapes.

The first pics were 240×320, and even on the low res monitors we had then, it looked like a postage stamp in the middle of the screen. That’s when I got the idea to make the 4x pics which worked because I was scanning from videos, and there was a progression of the action.

I bought the comp to access porn because I’ve always been an addict, so I went to the newsgroups because that’s where it could be found. After learning how that worked, I began posting my pics, of course using the dogfart name.

What’s hilarious about this is when they started coming up with search engines, I decided to punch in dogfart and see what it would find. I saw some of my newsgroup posts, and some other posts from another dude calling himself dogfart. I checked them out and they came from a very racist newsgroup where N-Word was the most common word used, and some of the worst came from this dogfart dude! Apparently he was established as dogfart in this group, and when I started posting my pics, he took a beating in that group from his peers. Even though they pretty much knew he didn’t post them, they hammered him about the pics every time I posted something new. It definitely shut him up in that group!

My boss hooked up with the real Dogfart, started Blacks On Blondes, and in a short time went 100% legit, deleting all the content Dogfart originally created and renting a mansion overlooking the hills of the Pacific Ocean. Under Dogfart’s watchful eye, my boss began producing original content. I began working for Blacks on Blondes a few months later, as second camera. Dogfart was living at the house, editing the content as fast as the first two directors, Sam Benjamin and Just TimberlakeFeelsYourPain, could crank out scenes. Then, a shot time later, I started directing the scenes for my boss’s second pay site, Gloryhole.com.

We’d wake up, drive down the hill to Ralph’s (celebrity sightings were a dailty thing) eat breakfast overlooking the Pacific, drive back up the hill and shoot porn til the sun set, smoke weed, watch Curb Your Enthusiasm, gossip about what happened that day, and have parties on the weekends. It was a great time.

(For anyone interested, Sam wrote a book called “American Gang Bang” about his life in porn…and this chapter in his life does come up. I just looked over at Amazon, and you can get the book or download the Kindle file.)

A couple years later, the online business model shifted, and the producers who owned more than one site started offering all their sites for the same price as the single-site membership — GET ALL OUR SITES FOR $29.95 A MONTH!

Porn, which was always very expensive, got really cheap. Not happy at all about this shift, my boss took his sites, put them under one umbrella, and decided to call it “The Dogfart Network”.

A couple years later, porn, which was now cheap, was about to be free. Pirates figured out how to stream content directly into the end-user’s browser, freeing the at-home pervert from downloading sketchy, unknown files (remember “Kazaa” & “Limewire”, & “Napster”?) — which leads us to yet another story.

And someday, when I blog it, I’ll call that story “The Beginning of The End”.