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Comment by stonethrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Is there a pack of AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, Shaw etc CDs as coasters one can buy nowadays? There must be an Atari E.T.-scale landfill of them somewhere. Asking for a friend.

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I remember (AOL I think) you could request trial CDs delivered to any address. No checks were made on either the name of the recipient or about the quantity of disks ordered. I'm guessing I was about 14.

Yep! I did the same thing - ordered enough of them to keep my relatively destitute family online without paying an internet bill.

Dad had to pay for a phone bill, but we got internet on top of that free of charge thanks to AOL. And of course, whenever we were done with one of the CDs it got taped to my bedroom ceiling, reflective side down.

Thats a productive use but we ordered hundreds of cds to people we knew with profanities in the name fields.

I liked when they’d come on floppies. You could rewrite it after taping the hole and get a free disk.

When I was a kid, I called up AOL and asked them for 1,000 floppy kits. For Reasons. They never questioned me, and they were fairly reliable and I never really had to buy disks again.

Similar story here.. At one point Intuit would send you a demo of Quickbooks on 7 or so floppies, so a friend called up and requested X demos and we split up the resulting disks. I was still saving college papers and projects on old Quickbooks disks many years later.

For 5 1/4" disks, you could double capacity by using a punch to cut a whole into one border and then use the back side - et viola, from 140 kB to 2x 140 kB.

But you had better not punch into the actual magnetic floppy disk inside its plastic enclosure, or you may have killed the whole thing.

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