My first experience with the porn industry was in the late 60s in Europe. Everything was shot on film then. You had to know someone who would process and duplicate them. It was tough. Scenes were usually around 10 minutes long, lead in, sex and finish.
When I got back into it in 1977 was selling photographs of girls via mail order. It was a great sideline to my main job. Was making $500 a week once it got under way. Spent most of the night answering orders and sending out the pictures. A year later I sold my first set to a magazine company for inclusion in Mayfair. It was of my first wife.
In 1988 when I turned full time, video was in it's infancy for all but the big companies. I bought a consumer VHS video camera and started shooting tapes to sell mail order. Had 3 VHS players wired together to copy them. Then came the orders. Selling a 100 tapes of each title, in the first few weeks was easy copying them on 3 machines was not. LOL Found a professional duplicator and
Astral Blue was born.
My first involvement with the Adult Internet was around 1996. A guy I knew in the UK who had moved to San Francisco. He was selling CD discs, via his website, of solo girl pictures I shot for the magazines. He was paying $10 a picture. LOL The problem was people would buy the discs and put it up on their sites and I spent half my time chasing them. some of these people are still around and joke how they got started pirating content.
1998 sold pictures via brokers like Scarlet, 2000 started the content stores.
The biggest problem in the early years was from the police. I had my door knocked on or kicked in a few times over the years. They never found anything because there was nothing illegal to find. But it looked good on their reports that they were hassling a local pornographer.