How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? “A Lot,” | Hacker News Reader

How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? “A Lot,”

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34 pointsobilgic26 comments

I have this theory that AOL warez/hacking/prog scene is the root of many startups that exist today. It's how I first learned to code by making punters. I had made the first punter for AOL 4.0, only to have my hard drive crash the day of release. This heavily demotivated me fyi.

A few buddies of mine got started here. I've also read Zuck used to mess around in the scene. Aol was my first foray into the internet at the age of ten or so (maybe younger?). My screen name was JediForce3 (Yup, i was a true geek). I think it was Aol 2.5?

Anyone else here used to mess around with AOL back in the day? Steve Case used to get a lot of crap, but I always respected him + looked up to him as the founder of AOL.

Whoa - fun to hear and think back. My experience on AOL definitely inspired my interest in programming. I had a really similar experience.

First, with BBS's on my Packard Bell Pentium 60mhz (got from Costco, had that famous floating point bug). That's when I learned the difference between a local call and a local "toll" call (same area code as you doesn't mean local...oops)

Then I got on AOL (starting with 2.0 for DOS I think), Prodigy, CompuServe, and eventually MSN.

On AOL I ran into those "proggies" and met a guy named Cybermun who explained to me how to write them (he wrote AoHades). He gave me a copy of VB 3.0. I found it totally accessible in that I could design my UI point-and-click and then figure out how to make it work.

I'd ask Cybermun questions endlessly and he'd never answer directly, always forcing me to figure it out. My dad bought me a copy of the white book (The C Programming Language, Kerningham and Ritchie) Hung out in private room "warez2" most of the time.

I was "WalrusPowr" (and a dozen variants of that name). Every time I entered a chat room I'd announce myself with some funny string and "{s walrus" (remember that!? It would play a .wav file, provided you had a file with that name).

After some time I wrote a relatively popular shareware app called AoLOL! (worked on AOL 2.5 thru 4). Each week folks would mail me a check for $14.95 for registration.

AoLOL! added a row of icons to the AOL toolbar and gave you a bunch of extra functionality (most notably a "keep in touch" feature, which would cycle through a list of friends and automatically check if they were online). This was before the Buddy List and before ICQ had launched. Incidentally, I was put in touch with the founding ICQ team, let them use my AOL account to play with the recently launched AOL buddy list, fixed the broken English on their web site, etc. (they were four young Israelis). They offered me a job but I was in high school, had no drivers license, etc. My UIN is 104006 (they started at 100,000).

I also wrote an app called "AoLMNOP" which was a bit of a joke. It launched of "Ao" proggies and generally mocked the entire scene.

I can't tell you how many hours I spent staring into a 14" CRT between 10PM at 4AM chatting and "coding" (VB3 and mostly "Sendkeys". Some Windows API calls. Ha!) while my parents thought I was asleep.

My younger brother tells me he'd wake up to the sound of me laughing out loud and hammering away at my keyboard. It was a big part of my youth. Ahh, fun times.

That's absolutely what got me into programming.

As silly as "progs" were, it catalyzed me to learn the Windows API, how to find and share code online, and how to build my first website (for the purpose of sharing my AOL code). It even gave me my first experience working with a remote team.

Now I run a web design and programming shop, with one of my best friends who stayed up on weekends with me "hacking" AOL in middle school.

(SN was EatenByCow, was a member of "Unity" if that rings any bells.)

Me too. I had a Mac so the Mac punter/prog scene was really tiny. Most of them were written using OneClick, a scriptable palette-building app to make on-screen widgets that fired off macros. Ah, those were the days!

FWIW my punters were named AOElephant and Hex.

I found that AOL was nowhere near enough, wasn't 'true network' (I understood this at 10), was heavily criticized by the PC media because of this (which I also used to read) so I switched it off and discovered BBS's

The BBS's were the foundation of almost every person I have met in tech, every job, all dev, every startup I have been involved with and there is a very strong camaraderie amongst the early BBS hackers (most of us went on to become v early web hackers).

So I see from how inside AOL you think your theory might hold, but outside of it there was an entire larger network that was far more interesting

I used both in the mid-90s, sort of on the tail end of the BBS scene, and while I did generally like the BBS scene better culturally, I think I agree with the previous comment that AOL got me more into programming. The fact that people were trying to do so many things on AOL that it wasn't really intended to support led to a whole cottage industry of teenagers writing scripts and bots and whatnot, whereas my usage at least of BBSs was much more straightforward and "normal" (I used them in the intended manner). I don't think I ever really scripted anything in my terminal emulator, though perhaps others did.

I ended up really getting into programming a bit later via mIRC scripting, though.

Yeah BBSes were a lot of fun back in the day. Used to play around on alt.hackintosh on Usenet too. Fun times!

So Quora has become the place for tech journalists to fish for the next article, not that there's anything wrong with it :-)

(The Netflix postage cost question came up on Quora first, then you can guess which tech publication (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/quora-netflix/) picked it up).

Example:

http://www.quora.com/User-Interfaces/Why-do-in-restaurant-re...

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/12/27/why-are-restaurant-w...

Those are not the same topic (reservation systems vs. restaurant websites) but there are indeed many, many examples out there.

One thing I never understood:

My family has had an AOL account since v2.5 (1995?), but the discs never stopped coming. Always seemed like an obvious waste of money, with a trivial fix.

Satisfied customers can give their discs to friends and family. In fact, sending discs to existing customers might be more effective, since a disc given to you by someone you trust must have a significantly higher success rate.

Damn, that's a good point. Thanks, I've seriously been wondering about that for > 10 years.

My Aunt ditched AOL this past summer she was still on dial-up! Now she is on DSL and a bit nervous it's such a change after ten or more years.

It's a powerful thing to have that support, AOL start page/"walled garden" instead of the wide open Internet.

I swear near the end AOL was offering more hours than existed in a month.

The real question for me is, where did they get my home address? I don't care so much about the cost for them of mailing the CDs, but what annoyed me more was how they got my name and address.

Call them the first spammers of the digital age if you will.

If you're curious, run a public record search on yourself. The ones that cost money. It's all out there. From your mortgage outstanding (if you own) to your rental history (if you rent - to a lesser degree if you find rentals through Craigslist).

With the effectiveness of online advertising declining, I wonder if we'll start to see more physical promotions. Although, one could easily argue that physical advertisements are no longer used because the internet exists as a viable way to reach users.

On a somewhat unrelated note, the CD promo led to one of my favorite commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OqQYk2TC-8

We got so many of them that my friends and I started using them as frisbees. Although the software was shoddy, the hardware provided some entertainment.

Could the stunt be repeated today, using USB sticks perhaps?

Why not just send CD's?

Everybody has a USB port. Not all laptops these days have optical drives. Also, USB drives are a lot smaller, and can be just as thin (eg Crucial's Gizmo Jr.: http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT8GBUFD...)

There is no way they spent $35 per CD, even including design printing, boxing, mailing and the "free hours".

Wouldn't a better question be how much they saved per employee by outsourcing nearly all their callcenter jobs? I would guess from $70 per person per day to $70 per month. And yet they are still hemorrhaging.

That's $35 per acquired user, not per CD. So if you figure that the cds cost a buck to make and ship, they acquired one user for every 35 CDs shipped. That seems high, considering how many I had lying around.

The fact that some businesses will pay $35 per acquired user also explains how some of those "free iPod" and similar offers worked. A typical one would require you to essentially get 5 people to sign up for their clients in order to earn your free iPod. If their clients were paying $35 per signup, that is $175 for the "free iPod" company for every iPod they have to give out, so the iPods aren't costing them net anywhere near as much as many would think at first.

Also, it turns out it is a lot harder than people think to find 5 friends or coworkers that you can convince to sign up for one of the offers. The company still gets its $35 for each of the signups, without having to cough up an iPod.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, I don't think the outsourcing of call centers back in the hey-days of AOL was that prevalent.

That said, AOL isn't the first company to bank on sending out free stuff to get a lot of customers. I believe Schick gave out free disposable razors to nearly everyone in the States at a time when there were no disposable ones. After exhausting their seed money on sending those out once, they raised a lot of money for now customers were flocking out to buy one.

Sorry, I mean how they moved all the jobs from the states overseas in recent history. In the "hey-day" of AOL they were all around the country and a very big employer. But they ran their ship into the ground, by being stupid and greedy IMHO.

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