Like it or not, folks, those things are payloads of history

May 26, 2015 2:32 PM

MeFi's own Jason Scott wants your goddamn AOL CDs.

As heard on All Things Considered and seen in Wired.

posted by ChurchHatesTucker (21 comments total)

Sorry, I destroyed all mine in the dot com office microwave.
posted by usonian at 2:44 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

Now's the perfect time to start trading AOL CDs!

If you're NOT an AOL Collector then you've stumped upon one of the fastest growing new hobbies since baseball cards. Spend some time looking around here and also check out my homepage* for more information. I bet you already have AOL CDs around your house. Now's the time to get in on the ground floor. Start Collecting. Need a book on AOL CD Collecting*?

*Note: both of these links to AOLCollecting.com are dead links, but Archive.org captured them, which is just delicious.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:52 PM on May 26, 2015 [4 favorites]

I literally threw out a garbage bag full of these and similar old software/driver/etc CDs a few months ago. Argh.
posted by LobsterMitten at 2:53 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

And srsly, Jason and Internet Archive have my deepest respect and gratitude, for taking the task of archiving of All The (Computer) Things seriously.

LobsterMitten, to the land fill! Let's document the outcome (that we already know)!
posted by filthy light thief at 2:55 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I used to have a large collection of 3.5" AOL floppies, or at least as large as was possible back before eBay and popular online trading and / or sales sites. Many minutes spent combing through the floppy stacks of everyone I know looking for "rare" variants, without any sort of master list or even game plan.

Eventually I sold them all online, once eBay became a thing. Might have gotten a whopping $10 for them. I don't remember.
posted by komara at 3:02 PM on May 26, 2015

What about my stamps.com cds?
posted by brookeb at 3:07 PM on May 26, 2015

Chucked a ton of cds when I moved a couple months ago :/ Most of them were home-burnt though.
posted by rifflesby at 3:07 PM on May 26, 2015

ARGH this makes me wish I had kept all of the floppy disks from my C64 and Amiga days.
posted by grumpybear69 at 3:09 PM on May 26, 2015

What about my stamps.com cds?

Wait ten years?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:10 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

The partial transparency makes AOL CDs a safe way to view a lunar eclipse.
posted by straight at 3:15 PM on May 26, 2015

One person's trash is another one's treasure.

What I'm saying is, it may be far too late to start trying to collect them.
posted by Greg_Ace at 3:16 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

I think the only ones of these that weren't immediately tossed out were the ones that got plunked on the axles of the science olympiad mousetrap car.

Not that it did any good, since the guy with the LPs won anyway.
posted by ckape at 3:16 PM on May 26, 2015 [2 favorites]

See also Futurama episode A Big Piece of Garbage: space object is garbage from the 20th century including a vein of AOL disks.
posted by larrybob at 3:27 PM on May 26, 2015

I think I still have a pile of 3.5" floppies and a few 5.25", too, including a v1.0 or v0.9 version.
posted by mbatch at 3:38 PM on May 26, 2015

Pretty sure every AOL CD I received in college got donated to a local microwave in need.
posted by maryr at 3:50 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

i gave mine away years ago to The Late Show. They created a suit of AOL CDs for Leonard Tepper to wear.

They never used the bit for the show, but I had a photo somewhere (sadly, can't find it at the moment).
posted by potsmokinghippieoverlord at 4:01 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

My former roommate worked in marketing at AOL. She showed me the room where they had leftovers of old CDs from mailings past. It would have made Jason Scott's head explode. I got a dozen and used them as coasters.
posted by jewzilla at 4:29 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I bet I still have a bunch of AOL/Shovelware/Shareware CDs in a drawer somewhere.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 7:04 PM on May 26, 2015

potsmokinghippieoverlord: i gave mine away years ago to The Late Show. They created a suit of AOL CDs for Leonard Tepper to wear.

I searched for an image of this, and I found a clip of Rupert Jee and Leonard Tepper Wired on the Late Show from 1996, and this image, which Google cites as coming from this very thread. I realized that was because Greg_Ace linked to it upthread, but it is still weird moment of recursive results.
posted by filthy light thief at 8:15 PM on May 26, 2015 [1 favorite]

I don't have AOL CDs, but I think I still have a bunch of Portuguese free ISP CDs around. Just in case I need a 15 year old WinZip distribution.

Ahh, the memories of dialing up in search of 3 kb/s.
posted by lmfsilva at 9:28 AM on May 27, 2015

lmfsilva, I think it would be really interesting to get information from free ISP CDs from around the world, beyond AOL. I think AOL is interesting as "At one point, 50% of the CD’s produced worldwide had an AOL logo on it," but what about the other companies that joined in this market flooding tactic? What did they include, and which version? I'm thinking of general History of Computers-type data, but still interesting data that could be crowd-sourced through this effort.

But I'll leave that decision up to Jason Scott and Internet Archive folks.
posted by filthy light thief at 2:24 PM on May 27, 2015