For younger users of the internet, it's hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was. The marketing team was on overdrive, all the time. And their marketing CDs probably caused a noticeable increase in CD-ROM adoption.
Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.
you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Mail
A few years back I was pacing a marathon and toward the end it was just me and a recent college graduate. Something caused me to mention AOL and she hadn't heard of it. I mentioned CD-ROMs and she said: "you mean, like for music?". She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995? It's amazing how something that was as ubiquitous as AOL (and it was ubiquitous) can come and go in a single generation.
Someone born in 1995 would normally be expected to be familiar with CDs because of their parents' music collection.
(And, depending on the family, because of their use as computer media. CDs were still important in 2005 when such a person would be 10.)
I also just double-checked this with my 24 y/o daughter and much to my chagrin, she also wasn't familiar with CD-ROMs. So that lead to a conversation about CD-ROM drives, ripping music, Napster, ... all things she was unfamiliar with.
They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
they were popular among hacker types during the free phase because they were one of the free ISPs that had an easy-to-fake dialer for a straight tcp/ip connection for nix machines.