came across some family heirlooms today, hahaha!

What is the runnig guy disc for?

a relic from the ancient past
https://www.digitaltrends.com/web/internet-archive-aol-free-trial-cds/

Trinitron display!? Those thing were top quality.

Those things are still top quality, for retrogamers looking for authenticity in how the pixel art in their old games gets rendered. High-quality CRTs need to be found a good home, not discarded.
- Working ones are getting harder to find (and thus more expensive) and are impractical for a lot of people.
  At least CRT shaders have come a long way (in particular, RetroCrisis has some fantastic ones for RetroArch: https://github.com/RetroCrisis/Retro-Crisis-GDV-NTSC) so we can at least make retro games look more CRT-like.
I had one of those bad boys for years. It was the best.

I always thought ME was okay. I think it just wasn’t that much different to 98.

You were lucky. I never had to shut down my WinMe PC, because it would blue screen and shut itself down near the end of the day, every day. I'm glad it introduced System Restore because I had to use it often due to constant data loss.
- i reinstalled ME sooooo many times
2000 was better, though.
Windows ME they decided to include the WinNT driver model (can't remember what it's called) alongside the legacy VXD drivers. It's actually quite similar to some of the complaints when Windows Vista did it again.
The problem was shit/rushed driver support. If you built a new PC with well supported hardware, or just got lucky, ME wasn't any less stable than 98SE in my opinion.
Of course the nuance is lost to time, all anyone remembers is "ME bad."

We had AOL in Australia for some reason, but my family could never use the trials because they required a credit or debit card. In the 90s and early 2000s, a lot of Aussie families had "bank cards" which worked at ATMs and in shops but not online. They used an Australian payment network (EFTPOS) rather than Visa or Mastercard.

In Australia today, debit cards are dual network - EFTPOS for local usage, and Visa or Mastercard for online and international usage.

My friends and I used to get those AOL CDs in bulk and toss them like frisbees. We were little shits, but it was fun.

They used to be 3.5” floppies and if you put tape over the copy protection hole you could get a ton of free disks

Sorry if this is a stupid question, but did you still pay for the call itself, or was this fully free?

It depends on where you live. I lived in a rural area so the nearest local isp was far enough away that it cost. The cds and floppies that constantly came in the mail didn't charge though. There were a bunch of those free services and ad supported isps. I had dial up for a long time and watched the business model go from portal style sandbox like AOL to literal "all internet is free if you keep this ad open. " towards the end before I left for college.
- You just gave me flashbacks of NetZero nightmares.
When I used dial-up, local calls were free.
- Not free. Included in your monthly phone line subscription.
AOL used a combination of local and 1-800 numbers. The only additional fee you had to pay was the AOL subscription.
I'm pretty sure you still had to pay your phone provider who may have charged $0.10/call unless AOL was using 1-800 numbers to dial to?
You would’ve had to pay for the call itself, but probably only if you had to make a long-distance call. I think by that time local numbers were pretty universally unlimited minutes, but long distance was 25¢/minute or more. I was too young to be buying phone service myself, then, but remember TV ads promoting 25¢ or 10¢ or something like that as a good deal. Around 2003 when I was first living on my own I used to buy prepaid calling cards to call home and those got me as low as 3¢/minute, and that was a bargain.
- 10 10 3 2 1. Bobwehadababyitsaboy. I forgot about those ads. They were super bowl ad popular in my memory.
It was free, but iirc, you had to sign up for a monthly subscription, and the 700 hours was just your first month free.

So they were just giving away America Online by the 700 hour quantity? I now blame AOL for more than I had previously considered.

It started small and they kept growing in how many free hours. It didn't stop at 700. I'm not sure where it stopped.
700 hours is about a month of nonstop use (not that people stayed connected all day back then). Not a bad offer from AOL's perspective, if you rolled into a subscription lasting years.
- I seem to remember our first disks/discs coming in with 5 free hours. That might’ve even been included with a Packard Bell we bought.
- Yeah, I guess if they would have framed it as one month free it wouldn't sound as good. I remember using it and completely ignoring everything but the actual Internet. Trolling on AIM back in the day was pretty fun.
- And I'm guessing enough boomers DID subscribe for years to make it worth it, if my anecdotal experience is anything close to normal.
I now blame AOL for more than I had previously considered.
Look up the phrase "eternal September."
For a while, if you were broke, you got as much internet as you wanted as long as you left the registration screen open and the modem connected....

Did anyone else know people who would say they'd just get a new AOL disc to "add more free hours" even though it very much did not work like that?

It did if you made a brand new account every time. Just like the $1 game pass fee or XBL on the OG Xbox when every MP game came with a 3 month free coupon.
- But you didn't need a new CD each time, iirc.

hahaha