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Playboy image from 1972 gets ban from IEEE computer journals
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
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Apparently the team making the first scanner needed a good test photo and that was the best they had on hand at that moment in terms of color variation and intensity.
Which is still weird.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna
Everything about the story sounds like it was a rush job, a decision made on a whim, after exhausting their existing catalog of test images. And who bring a Playboy mag to their university's computer lab, and advertises their possession? They don't even say who it was, probably to protect them from any embarrassing professional consequences. To me, that's probably the strongest reason to retire it: it's unprofessional.
Probably a random grad student. They were just coming out of the "sexual revolution" of the 60s at that point. It'd be a lot weirder ten years earlier or ten years later.
That a similar thing did happen ten years earlier is the weird part, I think.
Keep in mind that Playboy had a reputation as more than just porn. A lot of really respected authors had work published in Playboy.
I not sure of its culture status when the event in question happened, but it would have been different then say, Penthouse.