I Want Your AOL CDs
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.