How Much Did Those AOL CDs Cost? A Lot.

The ones with the silver logo made awesome guitar picks!

Nice way to waste a butt load of oil. Douchebags.

never seen one on those before... o.O

ops... one OF those... sry for double post... xD

I reformatted the floppies and used them as boot disks.

Microwave antics and a coaster or frisbee or two (they don't fly well, but they crash superbly).

Discus throwing competitions with my friends, mostly

i might have a cd case of them somewhere
I had somewhere around twenty of them but don't know how many are left

When my dad cut off internet thinking it wasn't necessary to save money, i used one of those 6-month discs to extend my life further, sure it was dialup but it was better than nothing.

AOL helped me through 6 months of my life.

@InTheCity

I think you belong on wired.com forums not tom's hardware

The 3.5" floppy disks were awesome. AOL sent me one every now and again. I'd format them and use them for DOS boot disks. Hardly ever had to buy floppy disks!

I received a lot of such CDs.
They arrived too frequent than needed.

what are AOL CD's?

I remember those showing up in the mail all the time. And I was only around 6 years old or younger.

I must have received at least 50 or more back in the day. Every time they updated the AOL software they sent one. I always got trial disks even though we paid for the services. They would also send one for different members of the household. It was ridiculous. They made ok, coasters for the computer desk so no liquid stains on the wood. I know someone who made ornaments out of them (go figure). Those were the days of highly contrasting colorful webpages. Yahoo was ugly as shit back then. I believe there is a site that shows you what different websites looked like back then, but I don't remember what it is.

A handful of highly efficient Prius cars would consume far more oil than producing all those discs. Considering most people don't drive vehicles nearly as efficient, I'd say it's a bit hypocritical to criticize a major corporation for their marketing efforts when the criticizee is consuming more oil for their own personal uses.

Let's not forget that AOL played a major role in developing the internet for mass appeal. In the mid 90's if you wanted the internet you usually got AOL. I still remember the day they stopped charging by the minute and gave everyone unlimited use. It took forever to get through to their overloaded network....but unlimited internet access, mmmmm now it it's hard to believe we used to pay by the minute!

And look where it got them...nowadays no one uses them except maybe for AIM (if that's still owned by AOL) but beyond that they're nothing.

I remember back in the day i created a program that would automate their "invitation" feature which allowed you to send trial cd's to a specified address. Good times, good times.

To think i was only 10 years old..

Being from Europe this article is really boring

Being from Europe and old enough to remember the 90's this article takes me back to a time when indeed at least weekly i got a disk from an ISP of some sort or another. AOL was far from limited to the united states though granted i only got a disk from them about once each month (every magazine had one folded in). The others where from 'het net', 'Ilse', 'zon net' and 'planet internet' et cetera. Some providers where kind enough to provide some use full tools on their spam CD-ROM's like the newest versions of IE Netscape and later even Eudora and updates for common software as well as adobe reader and such. When they first start shipping them there was little to no use full software on them so i usually dumped them in the bin pretty fast however later on i would keep a stack around to give to friends who needed the updates or software on them since the CD-ROM's and floppy's that where actually loaded with shareware and demo's that came with the same magazines usually had one or two interesting things on them i wanted to keep around myself.

AOL was a big, really big back in the day, and I guess they should be credited for getting a huge number of people online when when being online was merely a curiosity or novelty. Too bad they didn't spend as much money improving their service and network speed. Although they started out pretty good. They quickly turned into a crawling slow online service that was geared to do one thing, shove as many advertisements into your face as your dial up modem could handle. It was just awful. Half the time you could not even connect because all the servers were busy, and if you could connect, the speed you connected was a complete toss up. How many of you remember setting the list and order of phone numbers to try and connect too when you wanted to sign on? Believe it or not, my parents still have AOL with a 56k modem dial-up connection. They use it everyday! I too must have gotten at least 50 of those disks, floppy and CD both.
They were great to level uneven table legs.

lol, I remember having to call into another city often because my local city was usually too flooded to connect to. They did start to improve eventually, but they never changed their business model towards high speed internet which was really their greatest downfall. I was one of the few that kept their service even after getting a different ISP to have faster DSL access, but they still charged $18 a month which was ridiculous considering all I was using it for was their chat rooms/profiles, (which before myspace/facebook this was about the best you could get.

I still remember fighting with a friend over talking to some girl from across the country. Then she sent us a picture and we stopped fighting haha. Oh the good ol' days of the early internet!

One of the biggest annoyances I remember was their way of talking 56k up like it was a huge upgrade. Really? Even back then I was underwhelmed as they threw up excuse after excuse on why it was taking so long.
Yes lack of ability to update their network killed them IMO. In full disclosure my wife was still on dial up AOL when I started dating her. I duly convinced her to spend the bucks for att dsl, later we got married, nuff said.

My brother got lots of them he put it on the basement wall so when you point a flashlight on pitch dark it reflects the light, makes the room alive.

One thing that I liked about AOL is that they supported Windows 3.1,3.11 WfW for a very long time up till around 2003 if one used it shortly for retro computing.Their news forums were a disaster though as later if someone didn't like (disagreed with)one of your posts they could flag a fairly innocent post and AOL would boot you off the Internet which became a bad annoyance if one was later doing a large file download on dial up access.I left them long ago.Afterwards I went for Qwest DSL with MSN which was fairly inexpensive in my area and it was a far better experience.

I wish AOL was still around as strong as it was. At LEAST it provided a safe atmosphere for it members. There needs to be that sort of control on the Internet. A better way to get tracked and a better way to get banned. Unfortunately, the Internet has become one big Pedo's Playground. There's THAT side of it, and there's the piracy issue. I remember going into AOL chat rooms and running into CAT (Community Action Team) members that would moderate chat rooms. I miss those days. This was when chatting was actually enjoyable. Too bad AOL couldn't maintain the same level of service, and compete with the FREE Internet. Maybe Google should acquire AOL.

In the early days they were sending floppies. I would erase and reuse them.

I would stick a couple of them on the wall behind my desktop PC, with the recorded surface facing away from the wall and towards the back of my PC. My PC was as close to the wall as possible and was in an unmovable frame attaching it to my desk. So this way, The CD's acted as mirrors and made plugging and unplugging of wires into the back of my PC easy

I had a friend who filled an entire wall in his pool room with AOL discs and other junk-mail CD's he came across. Looked pretty cool.

If you were REALLY lucky, they would send the CD is a plastic box, similar to what a
DVD comes in. That was definitely recyclable.

They make awesome Christmas tree decorations! Put lights on the tree first. Then, just push the branch tip through the center hole, data side OUT, and repeat. You need a good 30 or 40 at least, but I collected them from neighbors, friends, and relatives.