
I Want Your AOL CDs - Doubleguitars
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624
======
beloch
Shit, I'm old.

I remember when Wing Commander III came out and I bought a CD-ROM drive just
so I could play it. At this special point in history, a typical hard-drive
could store maybe one or two CD's worth of data at most. CD's were #$%^ing
_magical_. Suddenly, games and educational programs could make use of _video_.
Truly, it was a leap forward in technology.

Just a few years later, at university, the "brotherhood of the golden disk"
was passing around the latest games on CD-R's. Diamond's first mp3 players
were a curiosity the rich kids had, and we were playing mp3's we'd downloaded
off of usenet on an ancient sparc3 that could just _barely_ decode them in
realtime. I splurged on a CD-R and suddenly I never had to delete anything
ever again. When AOL discs arrived in the mail, it seemed strange that anyone
would just give away something as valuable as CD's!

A few years later, I was using AOL CD's as coasters. I had a storage box built
for 5-1/2" floppies that was now full of CD backups of files I'd never look at
again. USB key drives had yet to arrive so, if I wanted to transfer tiny
source files around, I'd burn a CD and not worry about all the wasted bits.

Today, a lot of computers don't even come with DVD drives. Apple never even
bothered to properly support Bluray. By the time BD-R drives came out, hard-
drives were an order of magnitude larger. Now they're nearly two orders of
matnitude larger. Backing up a large hard drive onto BD-R's now would be more
tedious than backing up a hard-drive to floppy discs when the first CD drives
came out. Depending on where you are, it might actually be faster to transmit
data half-way across the world than to burn it to a BD-R disk.

~~~
jholman
Time for old-man-stories about CD-ROMs? Oh, oh!

In high school, I loaned my best friend my life savings, $7000, with interest,
$6k of which was used to purchase a CD writer, which he was planning to use to
run a data backup service for local businesses (the other $1k was used to buy
RAM... I think maybe 16MB?).

Personally, I find several facts in that paragraph kind of remarkable.

In retrospect, I think the interest rate did not reasonably reflect the high
level of risk involved. The CD backup business didn't work out, and we had to
renegotiate the terms of the loan, but he did pay me back.

~~~
rottyguy
I had a job with MCI (hell that screams old right there) back in the early
90's. They were developing a new project (Perspective, I believe it was
called) that would revolutionize the way that billing was done. So instead of
shipping a truckload of paper bills to a company like JCPenny, they would just
burn the information onto a CD and deliver it. I recall being told that the CD
burner they had bought (which was a box the size of a nightstand) was 100k+.

oh and I think the media cost like $50 per burnable cd (or something like
that).

------
slipstream-
When I was busy a few months ago archiving the AOL download areas, I found
some undocumented file areas full of AOL betas. I downloaded over 10gb of
them.. at 100-200kb/s. There were more, but I figured the rest of the channel
I was working with (related to archiveteam funnily enough) would get them...
and then AOL killed the downloads back in January this year. (They probably
still exist on the servers though - you can still get at the metadata!)

Anyway, I figured a friend of mine might want them; he said he did, so I
uploaded them to him (at my crappy 768kbit/s upload speed it took an entire
weekend!). Upon completion he said he no longer wanted them.

Um.

Anyway, I just contacted Jason Scott. Hopefully he'll be willing to wait a few
days. Or I could just burn the file to a BD-R, I have a bluray burner and a
spindle of BD-Rs somewhere that I've never used.

~~~
dubwubz
> Or I could just burn the file to a BD-R

I find your lack of faith in the internet disturbing.

~~~
slipstream-
Haha.

(I really wish I had better upload speed.)

------
rottyguy
Anyone remember the futurama episode where they found a huge pile of garbage
floating in space launched by earthlings in the 21st century? Of notable items
there were loads of AOL discs.

[http://theinfosphere.org/Giant_ball_of_garbage](http://theinfosphere.org/Giant_ball_of_garbage)

~~~
slipstream-
AOL floppies even. Which could have been reused.

~~~
LordKano
For several years, an AOL floppy was my go to boot disk for Windows 95
installs and repairs.

~~~
astrodust
For several years, AOL was the singular reason why floppies were still made.
Then they switched to CDs.

------
bane
This may sound kind of weird or even quaint, but this is exactly the kind of
awesome archiving work that Jason Scott is fantastic at preserving. Why is it
important? Literally tens of millions of people were first brought on-line and
connected using software from these CDs. They were connected, often for free,
to first AOL's information and other people connected through AOL, and then to
one of the greatest human achievements in history, the internet.

I _still_ have friends who have aol email accounts, keeping them alive simply
because the switch cost for them is too high.

AOL also helped anchor the tail-end of the East Coast's version of Silicon
Valley, the Dulles Tech Corridor/Netplex...a place where literally half of the
world's internet traffic passes through.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor)

------
mintplant
I used to collect AOL CDs as a kid. Got a new one every time we went to the
grocery store. I'll have to check back home and see whether they finally got
thrown out.

------
DangerousPie
The best thing about AOL CDs were the plastic cases they came in. These were
invaluable back when you would buy spindle of 100 CD-Rs to burn but then
didn't have anywhere to put them!

At some point they wised up and started putting stickers on the cases that you
could not easily remove. Nevertheless, I still have tons of old CDs in AOL
cases at home...

Never kept the AOL CDs unfortunately!

~~~
theandrewbailey
I think I still have a clear DVD-sized thin case from about 2001, and a AOL
tin that conveniently holds a CPU.

------
vblord
I collected aol cds as well. I have a 3 1/2 disk of aol version 2.5, the first
one that let you connect via TCP/IP. About 6 years back I installed it and I
was able to connect over my cable modem. Pretty neat.

~~~
slipstream-
You can't do that now. AOL dropped support for clients <= 3.0 back in January
this year, and a month or so ago dropped support for clients <= 5.0.

------
__z
My parents have tons of these types of CDs from about 1996, I'll have to get
them from them.

------
alaskamiller
I have 1,000 AOL CDs from v3 to v10

~~~
textfiles
You are likely keeping them for a reason, but I'd like any and all unique
copies.

~~~
alaskamiller
I too wanted to make art. I had a coworker a long time ago that kept AOL CDs
strung with string, it was a good ten feet roll.

------
Houshalter
My dad collected a ton of these, thinking they'd have value someday. I thought
he was nuts. I'll ask him if he still has any.

------
astrodust
Just think of the gold you could mine from the effort to send one million CDs
back to AOL:
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2440911.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2440911.stm)

------
Kiro
What's on the AOL CDs?

~~~
slipstream-
the AOL client software.

~~~
textfiles
AOL Client Software, along with game demos, browser installations,
advertising, music, utilities, and varieties of promotional material...
depending on which CD, and when it was made.

------
niix
Wow this brings back some memories. I attribute AOL to all of my programming
curiosity and success. When I was around 11 or 12, my dad put in me in front
of AOL 2.5 and from there I was curious how things worked. I quickly got
involved in the AOL "prog" community and learned how to write small (some
times malicious) applications in Visual Basic for AOL. Those were the days
haha :)

~~~
peterwwillis
Coding, indexing, and mirroring AOL progs actually changed my life. I got
expelled in 8th grade due to my school's network admin claiming I was hacking
the Apple school network using Win32 VB AOL tools (?!), which kick-started a
series of more run-ins with future school administrators, made my mother so
depressed she couldn't get out of bed, and eventually led to me quitting
school altogether. I didn't think of AOL as the spark that led to all this
until just now.

It definitely had a way of instilling a sort of wonder about what was "behind"
all those windows, what was possible, and whether you could get it to do
something it wasn't supposed to. Punters were the weirdest thing about AOL,
because they could have easily fixed them but seemingly never did. If it
stopped working in a new version, a simple modification would make it work
again.

~~~
niix
Ironically Steve Case just came through where I live. I imagine if I was there
to meet him I would let him know that AOL is basically responsible for me
being a professional software developer.

I remember building all kinds of weird "PrOgZ": punters, mass imers, emailers,
scrollers, etc.

So much fun :D

~~~
cmdrfred
Oh man, I was in a group of 'punters' called the seven deadly sins way back,
our favorite target was yahoo chat rooms though because they had this voice
chat system and if the poor end user left their mic on you could hear them
getting hit with a few thousand im's and freak out.

------
richardwhiuk
Surely there's a line where this becomes copyright infringement?

~~~
kristofferR
Copyright infringement is only an issue when someone cares.

~~~
coldpie
God, I wish more people understood this. Why on Earth would AOL care if
someone distributed their 20 year old software enough to sue over it?

