
The Competitive World of AOL Disc Collecting - rickdale
http://www.vice.com/read/inside-the-weird-world-of-aol-disc-collecting-511
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caminante
The accounting fraud's[1] the best part of the AOL CD lore.

    
    
      For fiscal years 1995 and 1996, AOL capitalized most of the costs
      of acquiring new subscribers as "deferred membership acquisition 
      costs" ("DMAC") -- including the costs associated with sending disks
      to potential customers and the fees paid to computer equipment 
      manufacturers who bundled AOL software onto their equipment -- and
      reported those costs as an asset on its balance sheet, instead of 
      expensing those costs as incurred. 
    

The financial impact?

    
    
      Had these costs been properly expensed as incurred, AOL's 1995 reported
      pretax loss would have been increased from $21 million to $98 million 
      (including the write-off of DMAC that existed as of the end of fiscal 
      year 1994), and AOL's 1996 reported pretax income of $62 million 
      would have been decreased to a pretax loss of $175 million.
    

[1][https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/34-42781.htm](https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/34-42781.htm)

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codewithcheese
cool, interesting. can you comment on why they did that?

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tekromancr
Not the parent, but I think the reason is simply making your numbers look
better. If you report the numbers this way, you look like you lost less money
by writing off the disks as an asset instead of a marketing spend.

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mentos
Funny that at one point AOL made fun of themselves for sending out so many
discs:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB3OJ9epr_0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB3OJ9epr_0)

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aninteger
Does anyone know if all the releases of AOL software are archived or there is
something like bitsavers for these software releases? I wonder out of 4000
unique disks how many unique software releases there were. 10-20 or 1000s?

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atesti
This guy wants to archive all of them:
[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624)

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acomjean
I wish I had known. I just threw away an AOL 3.5 inch floppy disk. Before
there were aol cds, they used floppies.

Odd what people collect.

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akilism
There's some 9 or 10 shoeboxes full of 3.5" floppy disks in my parent's
basement. Probably 3 of those are just AOL disks.

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sp332
Jason Scott put up a post asking for them, you can ship them off if you want
them archived.
[http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624](http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624)

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JimiofEden
My family mostly started gluing felt to the back of them and using them as
coasters.

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stevecalifornia
Warning, this story is a tad graphic.

I had a friend, a very big guy, who kept a few hundred AOL CDs in the trunk of
his car. He would put one in his pocket when he went to friend's houses. When
he used the bathroom, his poop was often too big to go down the toilet so he
would use the CDs to cut up the poop first.

True story.

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teddyh
Obligatory Absurd Notions:
[http://www.absurdnotions.org/page93.html](http://www.absurdnotions.org/page93.html)

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sixothree
And I thought I was special with my AOL 1.1 floppy disk.

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jtr1
Obligatory xkcd: [https://xkcd.com/1095/](https://xkcd.com/1095/)

