Remember when your biggest worry was making sure you had enough AA batteries for your Walkman? The 1990s were a wild ride of technological breakthroughs, questionable investments, and truly unforgettable moments. While some ‘90s trends have managed to stick around (I’m looking at you, Friends reruns), others died off faster than an unfed Tamagotchi. Let’s wander down memory lane and revisit some things that had us all buzzing in the ‘90s but barely would get a shrug today.
#1: AOL Free Trial CDs
If anything was more ubiquitous in the ‘90s than the screech of dial-up internet, it was those shiny AOL free trial CDs that seemed to materialize out of thin air. They arrived like clockwork and promised 500+ free hours of Internet access with each new disk. We collected them, used them as coasters, hung them up to scare birds, and sometimes even installed them. Today, most of them are in landfills, but back in the day, AOL reportedly dropped more than $300 million on these disks.
