Do you remember… AOL free-trial CDs?

They came through the letterbox, stuck to the front of magazines and piled up by the till at the video shop. Shiny discs promising hours and hours of free internet, if you’d just pop one in and sign up. Before the CDs there were floppy disks, which at least you could reuse.

The flood was the work of Jan Brandt, who joined America Online in 1993 with one job: get more members. It worked. AOL grew from around 200,000 subscribers to more than 22 million, and Brandt later said that at one point half of all the CDs made in the world had an AOL logo on them. Nobody has quite checked her maths, but anyone with a kitchen drawer full of the things would believe her.

Plenty of them ended their days as coasters, bird scarers and very shiny frisbees. A few are now in the Smithsonian, which is more than most of us can say.