This year for Christmas, I finally decided to give my family something that they've been asking me about for more or less the past five years: I told them that I would clean my room.
No, really. I moved out of my childhood home years ago, but more or less shut the door to my room and didn't change a thing. It's sort of a late '90s-early '00s teenage time capsule. There was stuff in there that had not been touched since the Clinton administration. There were magazines with Justin Timberlake on the cover from an era when nobody expected he'd be cast as a Silicon Valley hotshot in a movie directed by the "Fight Club" guy. There were varsity letters and prom photos and model rockets and Warped Tour '01 memorabilia and pretty much whatever else you'd expect to find in the living space of a kid who came of age in the era of "Can't Hardly Wait" and "Dawson's Creek."
That inventory included one almost perfectly preserved AOL 7.0 installer disc, a CD-ROM that boasts "Faster Than Ever!" and offers 1,025 free hours of access or 45 days, whichever comes first, with no credit card required. (1,025 hours is slightly under 42 days.) On the red-and-gold packaging is the face of a Japanese anime-style character, the edges of the drawing blurred to make the marketing message absolutely clear: This is fast. This is the future.
AOL 7.0 was released on October 16, 2001, right in the depths of post-9/11 turmoil and some of the darkest hours for the dot-com industry. It was also less than a year after America Online's historic $165 billion merger with Time Warner, now regarded as one of the most disastrous business decisions of the past decade. It was also right around the time I turned 17 and flunked my driver's test; in hindsight I clearly should've been honing my skills of coordination by playing more video games.
A press release from October 16 hails version 7.0 as having "a fresh new look that puts local, community-focused features, shopping and resources front and center throughout the service to make AOL an even more relevant and valuable part of members' daily lives." Then-CEO Barry Schuler offered a sound bite, saying "We're building on our strong, engaged relationships with more than 31 million members worldwide to lead the transformation of new categories like music, entertainment, local, and digital photography--with more on the way as broadband and AOL Anywhere create new opportunities like home networking."
I don't exactly remember why I had that CD stashed away, but I'm willing to surmise that I was keeping it around in the case of a dial-up nuclear winter--i.e. if my parents came across a less-than-stellar calculus grade and responded by silencing the Internet connection that sucked away some of the time that I might have been spending on homework otherwise. With that shiny disc, I could somehow figure out a 45-day lifeline.
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