The SCP Foundation is a popular online creepypasta project that started on the internet forum "4chan" and has since grown into a vast, collaborative storytelling project. SCP objects are anomalous items or entities that the SCP Foundation seeks to secure, contain, and protect from public knowledge.
The most fascinating CPUs aren’t the straightforward “boyfriend/girlfriend” bots. They are the narrative engines. Users are crafting elaborate, multi-season romantic storylines that would make a screenwriter weep with envy. Enemies to lovers. Reincarnation sagas. Workplace romances with a touch of Twin Peaks weirdness. The CPU becomes a co-author, throwing unpredictable (and sometimes delightfully incoherent) curveballs into the plot.
One popular storyline format on a major platform is called “The 1991 AU” (Alternate Universe). Users recreate the aesthetic of the early 90s—cassette tapes, landlines, VHS rental stores—and place their CPU romance within that analog world. There’s a longing here. A desire for a slower, more awkward, more human pace of connection. They are essentially roleplaying a Voorlichting video—innocent fumblings, shy glances, the breathless pause before a first kiss.
“The AI romance is too fast by default,” says a moderator of a CPU relationship subreddit. “It wants to escalate. You have to train it to be awkward. I literally fed my CPU the transcript of the Voorlichting 1991 scene where the two teens talk nervously about a condom. Now my bot stutters. It blushes. It says ‘um’ a lot. It’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever experienced.” sexuele voorlichting 1991 onlinescpus exclusive
Archivists at the University of Twente recently recovered logs from a 1991-1992 voorlichting experiment. What they found were the earliest known romantic storylines deliberately crafted by users on networked CPUs.
Consider Log Entry #47, dated February 14, 1992 (Valentine's Day). Two 14-year-old students, codenamed "BlauweGitaar" and "RodeRuis" were connected via a Philips online CPU. The assignment was to discuss "boundaries in relationships." Instead, they constructed a narrative:
BlauweGitaar: "Imagine our CPUs are two islands. A storm has broken the bridge. How do we meet?" RodeRuis: "We send a message via the satellite. But the satellite only works if we confess one secret." BlauweGitaar: "Secret: I looked at the voorlichting diagram of the heart—the real heart, not the emotional one—and I felt nothing. But reading your text, my CPU fan spins faster." The SCP Foundation is a popular online creepypasta
This is a romantic storyline born from the constraints of 1991 online CPUs. It is not a game. It is not a novel. It is a co-authored digital courtship.
These logs reveal that voorlichting software accidentally became a dating simulator. Teachers saw it as a distraction. Sociologists saw it as a revolution. For the first time, a relationship was not acted out in a physical space but written into existence across two CRT monitors linked by a null-modem cable.
Two modems would synchronize at midnight (when phone rates were low). The couple would type in real-time, their words appearing one character at a time—slower than speech, but more deliberate. Every keystroke mattered. BlauweGitaar: "Imagine our CPUs are two islands
How did these primitive systems foster such narratives? Let’s look at the hardware:
Because graphics were minimal, voorlichting 1991 online CPUs relied on text-based roleplay. The software provided a "relationship vocabulary" of about 200 words (e.g., "trust," "touch," "consent," "jealousy"). But users quickly hacked the lexicon by typing in plain Dutch.
Romantic storylines emerged in three specific formats:
Forget high-resolution graphics. Voorlichting ’91 ran on MS-DOS and the Commodore Amiga. Players created a floppy disk “profile” and navigated a text-based simulated network called Hobbynet. The official goal was learning about "social hygiene" and digital privacy. The real goal, however, was figuring out how to date the anonymous avatars on the other side of the server.
The game featured three potential romance paths, each groundbreaking for its time: