I Want Your AOL CDs | Hacker News Reader

I Want Your AOL CDs

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Shit, I'm old.

I remember when Wing Commander III came out and I bought a CD-ROM drive just so I could play it. At this special point in history, a typical hard-drive could store maybe one or two CD's worth of data at most. CD's were #$%^ing magical. Suddenly, games and educational programs could make use of video. Truly, it was a leap forward in technology.

Just a few years later, at university, the "brotherhood of the golden disk" was passing around the latest games on CD-R's. Diamond's first mp3 players were a curiosity the rich kids had, and we were playing mp3's we'd downloaded off of usenet on an ancient sparc3 that could just barely decode them in realtime. I splurged on a CD-R and suddenly I never had to delete anything ever again. When AOL discs arrived in the mail, it seemed strange that anyone would just give away something as valuable as CD's!

A few years later, I was using AOL CD's as coasters. I had a storage box built for 5-1/2" floppies that was now full of CD backups of files I'd never look at again. USB key drives had yet to arrive so, if I wanted to transfer tiny source files around, I'd burn a CD and not worry about all the wasted bits.

Today, a lot of computers don't even come with DVD drives. Apple never even bothered to properly support Bluray. By the time BD-R drives came out, hard-drives were an order of magnitude larger. Now they're nearly two orders of matnitude larger. Backing up a large hard drive onto BD-R's now would be more tedious than backing up a hard-drive to floppy discs when the first CD drives came out. Depending on where you are, it might actually be faster to transmit data half-way across the world than to burn it to a BD-R disk.

Time for old-man-stories about CD-ROMs? Oh, oh!

In high school, I loaned my best friend my life savings, $7000, with interest, $6k of which was used to purchase a CD writer, which he was planning to use to run a data backup service for local businesses (the other $1k was used to buy RAM... I think maybe 16MB?).

Personally, I find several facts in that paragraph kind of remarkable.

In retrospect, I think the interest rate did not reasonably reflect the high level of risk involved. The CD backup business didn't work out, and we had to renegotiate the terms of the loan, but he did pay me back.

I had a job with MCI (hell that screams old right there) back in the early 90's. They were developing a new project (Perspective, I believe it was called) that would revolutionize the way that billing was done. So instead of shipping a truckload of paper bills to a company like JCPenny, they would just burn the information onto a CD and deliver it. I recall being told that the CD burner they had bought (which was a box the size of a nightstand) was 100k+.

oh and I think the media cost like $50 per burnable cd (or something like that).

Ahh...CD-ROMs. Those PC-GAMER demo discs are the biggest reason I volunteered to go to the grocery store with mom. Getting them through the plastic wrap and into my pocket was effortless. Sorry, grocery stores.

I remember my dad, who was an IT teacher, buying a CD-ROM drive for a computer at school. The computer was from roughly 1993, and probably had a 210MB hard drive [1]. That site also has the pre-IDE expansion card the external CD-ROM drive was connected to [2].

At the time, linking IT to other subjects was in vogue. He bought about 5 educational CD-ROMs, for science, geography, history, etc, which had far more image and video content that anything we'd experienced before. I spent hours browsing them.

It was 2000-1 when someone in my class had sufficiently useful broadband for him to download DivX films and sell CD-Rs containing them, for about 50p per disc.

[1] http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/Computers/A5000.h... [2] http://chrisacorns.computinghistory.org.uk/32bit_UpgradesA2G...

> At this special point in history, a typical hard-drive could store maybe one or two CD's worth of data at most

Not even that. IIRC 2GB drives were around but very expensive. 4GB units may even have been commonly available, but certainly not affordable for home use.

I think a little before then I got a 250MB drive to upgrade a PC that had 100MB in total (40MB and 60MB) so even counting it all I didn't have a full CD worth.

The race for size really seemed to heat up soon after though, the growth in multimedia content increasing consumer demand high enough to bring prices down (starting a spiral as people generally having more space encouraged developers and publishers to use more and higher definition content). IIRC 1GB drives (still only one-ana-bit full CDs worth) were fairly common in home PCs in 1996 (the year before I went to university), and a couple of tens of GB was common by 1999.

I remember that the PC my parents got in 1996 couldn't even hold one CD of data. (~500 MB, but Encarta 95 that came with it was >600 MB) My parents were and still are cheapskates.

Yup, back in those days games required the CD in to play not because they had to check you bought the game but because the games actually required the resources on the disc.

My parents were so cheap I didn't even have encarta but some cheap IBM branded clone.

I'm a bit old school i guess i still have a wall of old CD's i probably won't ever need of programs, music, movies old outdated versions of software and backups.

CDs, DVDs and Blurays are just so cheap that i still write things to disk when I'm not certain i would need something in the future.

And i have to say it pays keeping things sometimes since the internet is ever changing and what used to be easy to find 10 years ago is almost impossible now.

I guess I'm somewhat of a collector just like the archive team.

If you'd not be willing to part with your physical discs, but if you'd be willing/interested in/have the time to make an archive copy (.ISO) and upload them to the Internet Archive - it would be greatly appreciated. As you say, the Internet is ever changing. By uploading archive copies, I'd say you'd be changing the Internet - for the better :-)

Hell, even years later when I was in high school and I was building my PC mostly from spare parts that friends and family gave me, I used to keep a lot of data burned on CDs. My HDDs were maybe 10GB total back then, so I shuffled things around, burning a lot of it to CD-Rs using slow 1x burner.

I digitized a good chunk of a Dutch broadcasters CD collection using a home-built cluster of 10 machines and a very expensive high speed CD reader. The data was shipped back to them (after encoding to MP3) using harddrives. This was a long time ago and the writing was already on the wall for the CD format.

Long term moving media will die but it has definitely surprised me how long they've managed to hold on and what capacities have been achieved.

I couldn't even tell from the top of my head if the optical device in my desktop supports bluray or not. Not even sure if I ever opened its tray since building the PC 2.5 years ago. I guess I shouldn't have wasted $30 on it.

So different than the time when an upgrade from 4x to 8x CD-R write speed was a big deal to me...

I have a portable USB DVD drive that I can attach for those moments when I really need one. Even those are starting to be hard to find, since they're based on laptop drives and laptops don't have them anymore either.

Blu-ray drives never made it into the "cheap" category, so if you don't know then it probably isn't.

When I was busy a few months ago archiving the AOL download areas, I found some undocumented file areas full of AOL betas. I downloaded over 10gb of them.. at 100-200kb/s. There were more, but I figured the rest of the channel I was working with (related to archiveteam funnily enough) would get them... and then AOL killed the downloads back in January this year. (They probably still exist on the servers though - you can still get at the metadata!)

Anyway, I figured a friend of mine might want them; he said he did, so I uploaded them to him (at my crappy 768kbit/s upload speed it took an entire weekend!). Upon completion he said he no longer wanted them.

Um.

Anyway, I just contacted Jason Scott. Hopefully he'll be willing to wait a few days. Or I could just burn the file to a BD-R, I have a bluray burner and a spindle of BD-Rs somewhere that I've never used.

> Or I could just burn the file to a BD-R

I find your lack of faith in the internet disturbing.

Haha.

(I really wish I had better upload speed.)

Anyone remember the futurama episode where they found a huge pile of garbage floating in space launched by earthlings in the 21st century? Of notable items there were loads of AOL discs.

http://theinfosphere.org/Giant_ball_of_garbage

AOL floppies even. Which could have been reused.

For several years, an AOL floppy was my go to boot disk for Windows 95 installs and repairs.

For several years, AOL was the singular reason why floppies were still made. Then they switched to CDs.

This may sound kind of weird or even quaint, but this is exactly the kind of awesome archiving work that Jason Scott is fantastic at preserving. Why is it important? Literally tens of millions of people were first brought on-line and connected using software from these CDs. They were connected, often for free, to first AOL's information and other people connected through AOL, and then to one of the greatest human achievements in history, the internet.

I still have friends who have aol email accounts, keeping them alive simply because the switch cost for them is too high.

AOL also helped anchor the tail-end of the East Coast's version of Silicon Valley, the Dulles Tech Corridor/Netplex...a place where literally half of the world's internet traffic passes through.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulles_Technology_Corridor

I used to collect AOL CDs as a kid. Got a new one every time we went to the grocery store. I'll have to check back home and see whether they finally got thrown out.

The best thing about AOL CDs were the plastic cases they came in. These were invaluable back when you would buy spindle of 100 CD-Rs to burn but then didn't have anywhere to put them!

At some point they wised up and started putting stickers on the cases that you could not easily remove. Nevertheless, I still have tons of old CDs in AOL cases at home...

Never kept the AOL CDs unfortunately!

Huh, those I knew came in cardboard sleeves. Which are not as handy as the cases.

I think I still have a clear DVD-sized thin case from about 2001, and a AOL tin that conveniently holds a CPU.

I collected aol cds as well. I have a 3 1/2 disk of aol version 2.5, the first one that let you connect via TCP/IP. About 6 years back I installed it and I was able to connect over my cable modem. Pretty neat.

You can't do that now. AOL dropped support for clients <= 3.0 back in January this year, and a month or so ago dropped support for clients <= 5.0.

My parents have tons of these types of CDs from about 1996, I'll have to get them from them.

I have 1,000 AOL CDs from v3 to v10

You are likely keeping them for a reason, but I'd like any and all unique copies.

I too wanted to make art. I had a coworker a long time ago that kept AOL CDs strung with string, it was a good ten feet roll.

My dad collected a ton of these, thinking they'd have value someday. I thought he was nuts. I'll ask him if he still has any.

Just think of the gold you could mine from the effort to send one million CDs back to AOL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2440911.stm

What's on the AOL CDs?

the AOL client software.

AOL Client Software, along with game demos, browser installations, advertising, music, utilities, and varieties of promotional material... depending on which CD, and when it was made.

Wow this brings back some memories. I attribute AOL to all of my programming curiosity and success. When I was around 11 or 12, my dad put in me in front of AOL 2.5 and from there I was curious how things worked. I quickly got involved in the AOL "prog" community and learned how to write small (some times malicious) applications in Visual Basic for AOL. Those were the days haha :)

and those archiving the AOL walled garden today are rediscovering said research. Back in December I coded a custom AOL .tol to send arbitrary tokens :)

Coding, indexing, and mirroring AOL progs actually changed my life. I got expelled in 8th grade due to my school's network admin claiming I was hacking the Apple school network using Win32 VB AOL tools (?!), which kick-started a series of more run-ins with future school administrators, made my mother so depressed she couldn't get out of bed, and eventually led to me quitting school altogether. I didn't think of AOL as the spark that led to all this until just now.

It definitely had a way of instilling a sort of wonder about what was "behind" all those windows, what was possible, and whether you could get it to do something it wasn't supposed to. Punters were the weirdest thing about AOL, because they could have easily fixed them but seemingly never did. If it stopped working in a new version, a simple modification would make it work again.

Ironically Steve Case just came through where I live. I imagine if I was there to meet him I would let him know that AOL is basically responsible for me being a professional software developer.

I remember building all kinds of weird "PrOgZ": punters, mass imers, emailers, scrollers, etc.

So much fun :D

Oh man, I was in a group of 'punters' called the seven deadly sins way back, our favorite target was yahoo chat rooms though because they had this voice chat system and if the poor end user left their mic on you could hear them getting hit with a few thousand im's and freak out.

Surely there's a line where this becomes copyright infringement?

God, I wish more people understood this. Why on Earth would AOL care if someone distributed their 20 year old software enough to sue over it?

Until the TPP takes effect around 2019.

That's the Archive's business to deal with. They probably have exemptions (like they are allowed to host all those games legally).

This guy has gotten cease and desist letters from catheter companies as well as been sued for two billion dollars. Watch his talk on the matter, it is really great - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSWqx8goqSY

AOL gave these things away in droves. They'd lose in court even if they tried.

I don't think that is as certain as you present it. Giving something away does not relinquish copyright, it merely passes one physical copy to someone else.

If what you state would be true then the GPL wouldn't have a leg to stand on, physical copies are rarely if ever used!

Giving an authorized copy to a third party doesn't involve any copying itself, and so copyright isn't really implicated here.

He does specifically state he'll accept ISO images as well as original disks.

The image would be a copy.

Otherwise, correct.

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