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Give Back to AOL

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Give Back to AOL — A broad-based coalition of online groups has announced an Internet-wide program to thank commercial online service America Online for providing computer users with so many free disks and CD-ROMs. Last year in TidBITS-270, we reported how AOL’s disk distributions were in fact an effort to prevent Microsoft from cornering the world market for floppy disks. Since then, Windows 95 has been released, and although it has become common on new machines, upgrade sales have been sluggish, with a high rate of returns. AOL’s ploy proved unnecessary, but the computer community still wanted to thank AOL for its valiant efforts; hence the Give Back to AOL program, which encourages users to send their stacks of AOL floppies and CDs back to AOL for reuse. Organizers of the program say they understand that CDs can’t be reused, but note that “you can do some really neat decorating things with them.” [ECA]

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