HOTTUB.GIF

HOTTUB.GIF, also known as FURTUB.GIF, and other similar images of the 1990s, were responsible for introducing many people to furry media, and the furry fandom in general.

History
HOTTUB.GIF was a drawing of a wide variety of furs enjoying a hot tub together. The artwork was by Steve Gallacci.

Propagation
When CD-ROMs were still fairly new and most hard drives were 40 megabytes or less, a number of publishers began pressing CDs of various ostensibly public domain software and pinup artwork for sysops (BBS operators) to offer for download. The CDs were attractive, as they held more than 16 times as much data as could fit on a 40 megabyte hard drive, and the files came with description indexes preformatted for most major BBS software.

As much of the content of these CDs was simply downloaded from other BBSes, copyrighted material frequently appeared on CDs, and many of the files migrated from one collection to all of the others.

HOTTUB.GIF appeared on numerous CDs, and people would frequently ask about the source of the images in FidoNet echos and on larger multi-line BBSes such as Rusty and Eddie's.