7 ms·
The Competitive World of AOL Disc Collecting
- acomjean 11y agoI 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.
- vblord 11y agoI have a few AOL disks that I refuse to get rid of. I don't even have a disk drive anymore. It's part of my childhood. My wife thinks I'm crazy... but I like them.
- akilism 11y agoThere'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.
- sp332 11y agoJason 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
- acheron 11y agoNow I'm wondering if I could still find the set of 5.25" disks for Prodigy circa 1990 in my parents' house. I'd say 50% chance they're still there. Something to look for next time I'm visiting. :)
- jharger 11y agoKinda makes me wish I had kept my parents' old 5.25" Quantum Link disk for the Commodore 64. That's what AOL was originally called, and it was so fascinating for a kid who had never even heard of "online" back around '89 or so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
- kevin_thibedeau 11y agoI still have an Apple ][ AOL 5.25" disk I kept in my old PC dual drive as a dust barrier.
- JimiofEden 11y agoMy family mostly started gluing felt to the back of them and using them as coasters.
- jtr1 11y agoObligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1095/ https://xkcd.com/1095/
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- mentos 11y agoFunny 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
- caminante 11y agoThe 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
- codewithcheese 11y agocool, interesting. can you comment on why they did that?
- tekromancr 11y agoNot 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.
- aninteger 11y agoDoes 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?
- atesti 11y agoThis guy wants to archive all of them: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624 http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624
- sixothree 11y agoAnd I thought I was special with my AOL 1.1 floppy disk.
- teddyh 11y agoObligatory Absurd Notions: http://www.absurdnotions.org/page93.html http://www.absurdnotions.org/page93.html
- stevecalifornia 11y agoWarning, 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.