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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 market

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.

throwawayoldie 1y ago
They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in the breeze would scare away crows.
TechDebtDevin 1y ago
What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?
- achandlerwhite 1y ago
  lol no. They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
  - aaronbaugher 1y ago
    Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet. Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide something similar, though all custom for connecting to their network.
  - chasd00 1y ago
    The desktop client had something like a browser. iirc you could get to the Internet but it was like AOL's version of the Internet. There was a keyword based search but I think websites had to register specific keywords with AOL or something like that to show up. The big thing with AOL was the "you've got mail!" sound once you connected. That voice was like a pop-culture meme back then.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      It wasn’t a browser by any modern sense of the word early on. All of the graphics were on the disk to reduce load time.
  - oniony 1y ago
    Don't forget the browser toolbar.
- jandrese 1y ago
  They predated the web browser by several years. Even once they added a browser a lot of people didn't have computers powerful enough to run them. Netscape for example needed 8MB of RAM, which was a lot in the early 90s. Plus back then the Web wasn't nearly as dominant. A lot of discussion happened on the Usenet, which AOL also provided access to much to the chagrin of the existing Usenet users. Email of course was also huge. Mostly it was expected that you would stay within the walled garden of AOL's service, using the keywords in their fat client to load topics of interest. More like a corporate version of a BBS.
gstrike 1y ago
And before they started sending the free CDs they would send 3.5" floppies! Need a another floppy disk? It was just a phone call and format away! Shipped!
pflenker 1y ago
I remember a campaign to collect aol cds, which were a 90s form of physical spam, so that they can be dumped in front of their headquarters. I eagerly asked all my friends and family to pick up as many aol cds as they can and hand them to me. I missed a couple crucial details (as an excuse I was quite young): a) CDs are heavy, b) the headquarters aren’t even in Germany so I would have to send the CDs overseas, c) shipping heavy stuff is expensive, d) it’s easier to spread the word to everyone that they should collect stuff for you than it is to tell them to stop. Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.
- jonbiggums22 1y ago
  The floppies were actually a bounty since they were rewritable unlike the CDs. I remember the tech guy at our school was given about a pallet of them to hand out to kids, which he instead kept in his office reached for when he needed to copy that floppy.
layer8 1y ago
Also: (“net.wars: The Making of an Underclass: AOL”) https://web.archive.org/web/20110505003755/http://www.nyupress.org/netwars/pages/chapter03/ch03_.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110505003755/http://www.nyupre...
chasd00 1y ago
> hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.
- lo_zamoyski 1y ago
  I don't think I ever bought a floppy disk for keeping things on during their mailing campaign.
- dimator 1y ago
  Magazines had their CDs tucked inside, sometimes 2 of them! What a time.
js2 1y ago
I mean, it got itself written into a major motion picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Mail 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.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995? 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.)
  - js2 1y ago
    She was familiar with CDs for music but not with CD-ROMs for distributing software. 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.
freedomben 1y ago
Indeed, and it kicked off a race of ISPs seeking to emulate. I probably had a dozen Blue Light (not to be confused with Blu-Ray) internet discs from K-Mart back in the day
- serf 1y ago
  I forgot all about blue light. 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.
ufmace 1y ago
At least when they were blasting floppy disks with their software everywhere, it was actually useful. Anyone even remotely interested in computer stuff could easily accumulate dozens of them without even trying. Just format 'em and they'd work fine for making copies of all the things that needed 5-10 disks to install.
jandrese 1y ago
And for people on the Internet every waking moment of their lives it's hard to explain how people got by at the insane price points those services had. AOL for example gave you 5 hours of dialup time per month. They billed by the minute. Every additional hour cost you $1. And they exploded in popularity because that was a far better price than their competitors (GEnie, Compuserv, Prodigy, etc...) Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.
Kye 1y ago
AOL keywords were the Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram handle in ads before Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Lists were published in various forms, including Hypercard: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_ult-aol-keywords-stack-62096 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_ult-aol-keywords-stack...

throwawayoldie 1y ago

They also disrupted the coaster industry by constantly mailing out free ones.

aaronbaugher 1y ago
Also the scarecrow industry. I recall people hanging CDs in their garden, as the sun reflecting off them as they moved in the breeze would scare away crows.

TechDebtDevin 1y ago

What did those CD's actually contain? A browser with some firmware?

achandlerwhite 1y ago
lol no. They had a fat desktop client and often Windows networking drivers because even the OS wasn't network ready for consumers yet.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  Yep. When we started an ISP about 1994, we gave the users a floppy that installed Trumpet Winsock, Netscape, and a handful of other programs for things like IRC and Usenet. Trumpet Winsock provided the dialup and networking which Windows 3.1 didn't have. AOL would have had to provide something similar, though all custom for connecting to their network.
- chasd00 1y ago
  The desktop client had something like a browser. iirc you could get to the Internet but it was like AOL's version of the Internet. There was a keyword based search but I think websites had to register specific keywords with AOL or something like that to show up. The big thing with AOL was the "you've got mail!" sound once you connected. That voice was like a pop-culture meme back then.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    It wasn’t a browser by any modern sense of the word early on. All of the graphics were on the disk to reduce load time.
- oniony 1y ago
  Don't forget the browser toolbar.
jandrese 1y ago
They predated the web browser by several years. Even once they added a browser a lot of people didn't have computers powerful enough to run them. Netscape for example needed 8MB of RAM, which was a lot in the early 90s. Plus back then the Web wasn't nearly as dominant. A lot of discussion happened on the Usenet, which AOL also provided access to much to the chagrin of the existing Usenet users. Email of course was also huge. Mostly it was expected that you would stay within the walled garden of AOL's service, using the keywords in their fat client to load topics of interest. More like a corporate version of a BBS.

gstrike 1y ago

And before they started sending the free CDs they would send 3.5" floppies! Need a another floppy disk? It was just a phone call and format away! Shipped!

pflenker 1y ago

I remember a campaign to collect aol cds, which were a 90s form of physical spam, so that they can be dumped in front of their headquarters. I eagerly asked all my friends and family to pick up as many aol cds as they can and hand them to me. I missed a couple crucial details (as an excuse I was quite young): a) CDs are heavy, b) the headquarters aren’t even in Germany so I would have to send the CDs overseas, c) shipping heavy stuff is expensive, d) it’s easier to spread the word to everyone that they should collect stuff for you than it is to tell them to stop. Took me a long while to get rid of all of them.

jonbiggums22 1y ago
The floppies were actually a bounty since they were rewritable unlike the CDs. I remember the tech guy at our school was given about a pallet of them to hand out to kids, which he instead kept in his office reached for when he needed to copy that floppy.

layer8 1y ago

Also: (“net.wars: The Making of an Underclass: AOL”) https://web.archive.org/web/20110505003755/http://www.nyupress.org/netwars/pages/chapter03/ch03_.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110505003755/http://www.nyupre...

chasd00 1y ago

> hard to overstate how omnipresent the AOL brand was you could find AOL cds and floppies on the side of the road. They were everywhere.

lo_zamoyski 1y ago
I don't think I ever bought a floppy disk for keeping things on during their mailing campaign.
dimator 1y ago
Magazines had their CDs tucked inside, sometimes 2 of them! What a time.

js2 1y ago

I mean, it got itself written into a major motion picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ve_Got_Mail 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.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> She had no idea what CD-ROMs were. So that's was from someone born in maybe 1995? 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.)
- js2 1y ago
  She was familiar with CDs for music but not with CD-ROMs for distributing software. 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.

freedomben 1y ago

Indeed, and it kicked off a race of ISPs seeking to emulate. I probably had a dozen Blue Light (not to be confused with Blu-Ray) internet discs from K-Mart back in the day

serf 1y ago
I forgot all about blue light. 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.

ufmace 1y ago

At least when they were blasting floppy disks with their software everywhere, it was actually useful. Anyone even remotely interested in computer stuff could easily accumulate dozens of them without even trying. Just format 'em and they'd work fine for making copies of all the things that needed 5-10 disks to install.

jandrese 1y ago

And for people on the Internet every waking moment of their lives it's hard to explain how people got by at the insane price points those services had. AOL for example gave you 5 hours of dialup time per month. They billed by the minute. Every additional hour cost you $1. And they exploded in popularity because that was a far better price than their competitors (GEnie, Compuserv, Prodigy, etc...) Once internet ISPs entered the scene offering unlimited unfiltered Internet for $20/month all of those services were doomed.

Kye 1y ago

AOL keywords were the Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram handle in ads before Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Lists were published in various forms, including Hypercard: https://archive.org/details/hypercard_ult-aol-keywords-stack-62096 https://archive.org/details/hypercard_ult-aol-keywords-stack...