The Competitive World of AOL Disc Collecting

http://www.vice.com/read/inside-the-weird-world-of-aol-disc-collecting-511

by rickdale • 11 years ago

44 18 11 years ago

vice.com

acomjean• 11 years ago

I wish I had known. I just threw away an AOL 3.5 inch floppy disk. Before there were aol cds, they used floppies.

Odd what people collect.

vblord• 11 years ago

I have a few AOL disks that I refuse to get rid of. I don't even have a disk drive anymore. It's part of my childhood. My wife thinks I'm crazy... but I like them.

akilism• 11 years ago

There's some 9 or 10 shoeboxes full of 3.5" floppy disks in my parent's basement. Probably 3 of those are just AOL disks.

sp332• 11 years ago

Jason Scott put up a post asking for them, you can ship them off if you want them archived. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624

acheron• 11 years ago

Now I'm wondering if I could still find the set of 5.25" disks for Prodigy circa 1990 in my parents' house. I'd say 50% chance they're still there. Something to look for next time I'm visiting. :)

jharger• 11 years ago

Kinda makes me wish I had kept my parents' old 5.25" Quantum Link disk for the Commodore 64.

That's what AOL was originally called, and it was so fascinating for a kid who had never even heard of "online" back around '89 or so.

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

kevin_thibedeau• 11 years ago

I still have an Apple ][ AOL 5.25" disk I kept in my old PC dual drive as a dust barrier.

JimiofEden• 11 years ago

My family mostly started gluing felt to the back of them and using them as coasters.

jtr1• 11 years ago

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1095/

mentos• 11 years ago

Funny that at one point AOL made fun of themselves for sending out so many discs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DB3OJ9epr_0

caminante• 11 years ago

The accounting fraud's[1] the best part of the AOL CD lore.

  For fiscal years 1995 and 1996, AOL capitalized most of the costs
  of acquiring new subscribers as "deferred membership acquisition 
  costs" ("DMAC") -- including the costs associated with sending disks
  to potential customers and the fees paid to computer equipment 
  manufacturers who bundled AOL software onto their equipment -- and
  reported those costs as an asset on its balance sheet, instead of 
  expensing those costs as incurred.

The financial impact?

  Had these costs been properly expensed as incurred, AOL's 1995 reported
  pretax loss would have been increased from $21 million to $98 million 
  (including the write-off of DMAC that existed as of the end of fiscal 
  year 1994), and AOL's 1996 reported pretax income of $62 million 
  would have been decreased to a pretax loss of $175 million.

[1]https://www.sec.gov/litigation/admin/34-42781.htm

codewithcheese• 11 years ago

cool, interesting. can you comment on why they did that?

tekromancr• 11 years ago

Not the parent, but I think the reason is simply making your numbers look better. If you report the numbers this way, you look like you lost less money by writing off the disks as an asset instead of a marketing spend.

aninteger• 11 years ago

Does anyone know if all the releases of AOL software are archived or there is something like bitsavers for these software releases? I wonder out of 4000 unique disks how many unique software releases there were. 10-20 or 1000s?

atesti• 11 years ago

This guy wants to archive all of them: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4624

sixothree• 11 years ago

And I thought I was special with my AOL 1.1 floppy disk.

teddyh• 11 years ago

Obligatory Absurd Notions: http://www.absurdnotions.org/page93.html

stevecalifornia• 11 years ago

Warning, this story is a tad graphic.

I had a friend, a very big guy, who kept a few hundred AOL CDs in the trunk of his car. He would put one in his pocket when he went to friend's houses. When he used the bathroom, his poop was often too big to go down the toilet so he would use the CDs to cut up the poop first.

True story.

The Competitive World of AOL Disc Collecting

Related Stories