Someone handed us every AOL CD. That is, every variation of every America On-Line CD-ROM. Over 5,000 variations.
Holy shit, that's going to make part of a great museum someday.
@textfiles wow!! I remember all the aol cds lying around our den! I may still have some in some boxes in the garage! Those days! I feel ancient.
@textfiles "Alter Fickschwede, wie geil!" was my first reaction xD
(roughly translates to: "Holy Shemoly / Dear Mr BoatyMcBoatface, thats so cool!")
@textfiles I remember being disappointed when AOL move from floppies to CDs because no more free floppies. They were my “film” for this puppy!
@alwirtes That was the camera for my first professional photo job shooting pics of kids at camp and making a slide show for them each evening. Stacks and stacks of floppy disks everywhere.
@textfiles I missed the initial post, but were these from a random collector, or an official, AOL source?
@spacerog In this particular case, official; the lawyer whose job for years was to vet every CD-ROM, floppy and DVD they put out for any unexpected legal issues.
@textfiles amazing! Glad you got the collection!
@textfiles Wait a minute - somebody kept all of those?
I'm trying to wrap my brain around this.
Wait. I still have the very last AOL floppy disk from the very last official OMNI magazine. I think I get it now.
@drwho @textfiles i collected them from other people as a kid who were going to toss them because I used them for Monster Rancher 2. I'd take any CDs people didn't want.
@lori @textfiles I had a cabinet full of them because we used them to do the Fibonacci sequence in the CompUSA parking lot on X-Day.
@textfiles so epic. that’s got to be at least 100hrs of internet. some kind of meta recursive loop archiving those.
@textfiles ~700MB x 5000 = 3,500,000MB (3.5TB - tiny!). That's one very special collection.
I had what was called a "cleanup run" a little while ago, which included repacking the AOL CDs into a more stable and company-policy-compatible storage setup. Having gone through them, they're the real deal - piles of unique specimens, getting digitized at some point.