. . . waiting several minutes for one of these pics to download back in the late 90s, early 2000s?

I had a 14.4K dialup modem in 1996 when I got on the internet for the first time. Yeah in those days, you'd start the photo download and go get a coffee... by the time yo came back the photo had arrived. Did you ever download binaries from the news groups? You had no idea what you had until you downloaded it and converted it to a jpg. I made my first website using Netscape Gold and was so proud of myself that I was now a "Webmaster" LOL!

Messyfun was the first site I ever came across and was thrilled to find I was not the only one into mud! I always thought I was a weirdo with my fetishes .. then came the internet and I end up finding 1000's of people just like me! I was normal after all

Me, I do. And what a disappointment it was if, after all that time, it ended up being an uninteresting pic!

I was definitely in the Usenet groups. So much diversity there. You could setup several pics to download, go to bed, then get up and see what you got.

I also remember getting so excited to see The plain 5 x 7ish envelope come in the mail, knowing it was Rob's Messy Fun newsletter!

Like a box of chocolates, lol.

Good times.

So in love with Shaun at the time

Not entirely. Around that time, I still thought the internet was stupid and wouldn't take off. I was in my late teens then, and PC technology was still garbage. I had a friend who swore by his 486, which I thought was garbage. I jumped in around 98 when 56k modems came around and Half Life and Counter-Strike came out.

Saved up working at Staples and bought my first computer, found MessyFun and WAMTEC and I was done!

Ah, I remember those days well. In some ways, it was more satisfying in the sense that every single JPG I downloaded felt like it had been *earned*... even though "earning" meant finding a way to kill time while the picture downloaded line by line.

For that matter, my WAM collection circa 2019 would've completely filled the combined hard drives of the first five or six computers I owned... and it's really not that big a collection.

I definitely remember this, but what sticks in my mind more is the night I spent downloading the Ariel's Pie Shop and 12-girl Pie Fight trailers. I believe they totalled a little over 12MB, so that was on the order of an hour and a half to wait.

I love the email address on that first sample image, ending with 'compuserve'.

Here's a photo from MPV that preceeds the web as we know it. It had their BBS (bulletin board system) phone number on it.

I had a Timex/Sinclair TS1000 computer at the time. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Sinclair )
It would have been the late 1980's. When I learned that I could download images, and that muddy images were out there, I was hooked!

To me, waiting for a photo to download was like fishing. You never knew what you'd get, and you had to wait for it. But most photos were worth waiting for.

I also remember when websites started popping up, and the biggest 'movie' files were .avi format and postage stamp sized, lasting a whole ten seconds!

Not too long ago Dave told me he still had the drives or the actual box to that BBS we all subscribed to as soon as we heard about it. The first muddy photo I intentionally downloaded was Shaun of Messyfun in a red dress hip deep on mud. From that moment the world changed for me. From that moment I was a different person with a new mission in life.

Below is a somewhat more recent image (2000) of Messyfun's Shaun and Ariel in an early MPV photo. I think by then I was still paying a fortune each month for an ISDN connection so I could bond both channels and download at a blistering 128K.

I have both of those trailers still! Ariel's is 6MB, 1m20s; 12-Girl is 8.7MB, 1m45s. Looks like I down loaded them both late April, early May of '97.

Nose to the monitor to watch them but man were they awesome. I have a total of 6 MF trailers and several pics.

I have 2 Messy Fun trailers MFV-1 and MFV-6. The first one is all about Shaun.

They are 6 meg AVI. Crap quality and really small... but in those days this was so advanced !

Ha, this.

We lived like savages back then.

Nope, I'm far too young to remember that.

Well a few of those pics are of my ex wife!!!

Phil

Oh to have been a mud dauber on your wall . . . .

Yeah me too! Those were the days of getting a snail mailed newsletter! I also remember this photo of the girl doing a hand stand in the mud featured in one of those newsletters.

It must be 20 years now that Rob passed and here we are all still talking about him. He was a true legend and I'm sure where ever he is he's smiling down upon us right now.

My first ever download was in 2000 from Wambabes.com, 19 years ago!

I remember when i found it my mind was blown! i remember thinking.. what the hell have i found?

I was so confused but also intrigued. I never had any 'wam' thoughts before I found those images but I couldn't stop searching after this.

Then i found UMD, and the rest is history.

Since that day iv collected close to 28,000 wam videos and pictures!

I remember how those great old pictures were an inspiration...

My experience was basically the same, with only the details changing.

I use a Pentium 1 Gateway with, I think, AOL. (May as well been a '32 Chevy).I found some site where the owner posted splosh pictures that were, maybe, in the public domain. It was fun.

Then I found Messygirl and then....