8:00am is text value, not a time (or any other numeric) value. Excel will always use upper case AM and PM when displaying time.
You can prove this by changing the format of cell A1 to Number. Instead of showing .33 (the value of 8AM) it will still display as 8:00am.
Once you have valid time values, multiplying by 24 should convert the value from fraction of a day to fraction of an hour. Using 8:30 instead of 8 produced 2.5.