CD-ROM Library

This page exists to catalogue all of the various and assorted CD-ROM's that I have encountered or have owned. I've split this page into general "areas" to help find stuff, and some titles will have links to sub-pages that contain further information such as an overview of the disc contents, and maybe even a little review of sorts.

Internet Service Provider (ISP) Sign-UP CD-ROMs

Something that is now forgotten in the modern age, and hasn't really been a thing since ~2008 at the latest are ISP sign-up CD-ROM's. Picture the moment, it's 2001 you've just got your new Packard Bell computer from your local PC World store. You've got it home and you've set it up, it was daunting at first as you've never had to setup a desktop computer before but a mixture of the included quick start guide and a little intuition you have the machine all connected and ready to power on. Fast forward a little while and you've been through the Windows start up experience, setup your user accounts and began to explore the included software on the machine (which the salesman gleefully told you had a street value of over £200!), however there is an element to computing that you're wanting to experience - the internet. Although you did connect your computer's modem to the telephone line, you haven't actually chosen a provider yet. Luckily in the box was a CD-ROM for AOL, when you walked out of the store you picked up a free CD-ROM for Freeserve and in the recent magazine you picked up was a CD-ROM for BT's offering. So many choices, you read through the promotional packaging of each CD-ROM and place them one-by-one into your computer - some of them have little websites or Shockwave animations to help you make a decision and get an account setup. An hour later you're online with one of them, making the most of the introductory offer of so many free hours!

As you can probably imagine the market for ISP's was extremely lucrative at the time, with many ISP's wanting to make you their customer for life - so a lot of effort was put into producing these CD-ROM's into the millions. AOL were the most notorious for this and produced ISP sign-up content in a myriad of ways, from simple CD-ROM's that only contained the AOL software, to bundling AOL in with other software (that you probably paid for!) to including links to AOL within Windows itself.

This area of digital ephemera is quite interesting to many of us computer nerds, even if the underlying content of the CD-ROM's are quite bland all told (many of them use less than 20MB of a 600MB CD-ROM, including some basic Internet Explorer branding content and maybe a read-me of sorts), but some of them did indeed "spice" things up a bit.

I don't profess to have a complete collection of every ISP Sign-up CD-ROM that ever existed, but over the years I've amassed a fair few. Diligently taking images of the discs and then uploading them to Internet Archive for prosperity. Most of the software included on these CD-ROM's is of no use anymore nearly 20+ years on, the companies being promoted no longer exist and the idea of using a modem to connect to the internet is long gone.

Explanation: To explain the above table; the ISP column is to group together these CD-ROM's by the ISP that is being promoted. I am well aware that some of the more "obscure" listings here are actually being served by larger entity, however for the sake of simplicity what is listed on the packaging is what will be here. The Version/Edition column is at least the stated version on the packaging, not all ISP's did this with the most consistent ISP being AOL. This doesn't mean this is the version of the web browser software included underneath, see this page for a directory of old web browsers. The Year column is again a calculated effort to work out when this CD-ROM was released, some are obvious and include copyright or release dates on the packaging - however some don't and this may be calculated from the latest filedate that exists on the CD-ROM itself. Summary is a column which will take you to a summary page for that CD-ROM, where I will go into detail about the contents and packaging of the item. Link will feature links to view/download the CD-ROM image, most of the time this will be hosted over at The Internet Archive.

Shareware CD-ROM's