Results: Remember these?

Blockbuster Video was once the place to rent your movies or games. Hard to believe that Blockbuster had an option to buy a newbie mail order DVD business named Netflix, but passed. There is one remaining Blockbuster still in business in Bend, Oregon. It is independently owned. Were you a customer of Blockbuster?

Even though VCRs would eventually become completely obsolete, they changed the way that people consumed media for forever. Prior to its invention, all content was served to customers on a programming basis. Someone else chose what came on TVs and when. With the rise of home movies, the people were given the power to choose what they wanted to watch, where they wanted to watch it, and even how they wanted to watch it. Did you have a VCR?

Before Google, we had Ask Jeeves. Back when Ask Jeeves (www.askjeeves.com or www.ask.com) came to the Web in the late 1990s, the premise was great – ask a question, get an answer (or a few choice selections). Ask Jeeves was billed as the "natural language" search engine which meant you supposedly didn't have to know about key words or Boolean search techniques. Users felt they were getting a very smart search engine that understood them in the language they spoke. In reality, it was more than 100 human editors who were fielding the posed questions, doing web research of their own and then providing a focused set of search results. Did you ever Ask Jeeves?

In 1993 AOL began mailing discs, first floppy and then CDs, to prospective customers in one of the largest and most aggressive direct-mail campaigns ever. Discs contained the software needed to use AOL and provided a few hours of free service. It was much more effective to let customers try it firsthand during a free 500-, 750-, or 1000-hour trial. AOL teamed up with Blockbuster to give their discs away to customers; soon after, the dam had burst, as people were suddenly besieged with discs everywhere they turned. They were at Best Buys and Barnes & Nobles, tucked inside magazines, in people's morning cereal box, on their fast food trays—pretty much anywhere eyes would be, a disc wouldn't be far behind. One of the stranger stories from AOL's "carpet bombing" strategy came when the company found out that freezing and thawing these discs wouldn't cause them any damage. Why? So they could be packaged with Omaha Steaks, of course. Did you use AOL discs?

The first floppy disc was introduced in 1971. It came in several different sizes, including the 8-inch and the 3.5-inch, and is composed of a thin and flexible magnetic disk sealed in a square plastic carrier. The different types of floppy disks required a different floppy disk drive. Floppy disks were an almost universal data format from the 1970s into the 1990s, used for primary data storage as well as for backup and data transfers between computers. Did you use floppy discs?