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- Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services. It was one of the major internet service providers of the 1990s.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service)
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Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services. It was one of the major internet service providers of the 1990s.
- Designed to Succeed, Doomed to Fail
- Send in The Censors
- From Bad to Worse
- Getting Chatty
- The Final Straw
- What Got You Online First?
There seemed no way anything could possibly go wrong. But the service got into trouble before it ever opened. Prodigy’s designers assumed that members would spend most of their online time viewing advertiser pages, news, and related “passive” offerings. And so the system was designed with minimal long-distance usage in mind. Points of presence (POP...
In 1991 Prodigy management decided to censor content. It probably began as an idea for reducing message traffic, but Prodigy started banning negative comments about advertisers and then any public comments about advertisers. Additionally, Prodigy banned profanity and anything else that might offend anybody. Next came a ban on flame wars among membe...
New rumors flew that Prodigy was reading everyone’s e-mail. Then a much worse rumor spread like wildfire: Prodigy was attacking users’ computers directly. As with AOL, part of Prodigy’s content was temporarily stored on members’ computer disks. Prodigy wrote elements of online sessions on its members’ computers and read data back for certain operat...
Through all the fireworks, Prodigy managed to keep hanging in there. The service added a file download area — operated by Ziff-Davis and surcharged. More and more members signed on. Then, in 1994, Prodigy made the biggest mistake of all: they offered unlimited chat rooms, with no surcharge. Telecommunications charges went through the roof as thousa...
Amazingly, Prodigy survived all the blunders. The backing of Sears and IBM helped, but the low price and the Internet were what actually saved the company from extinction, at least temporarily. Offering USENET and FTP kept people interested in Prodigy in general. In 1997 Prodigy became an ISP, while still maintaining the online service aspect, much...
Were you one of those who got started with Prodigy? Or did you start with one of the other commercial services like CompuServe or AOL? Maybe you started like many did in the 80s on an old-fashioned BBS.Take the poll below and sound off in comments. ————————————————————————————— Michael Banks is the author of On the Way to the Web: The Secret Histor...
Jul 12, 2014 · In this case, the missing cultural repository is Prodigy, a consumer-oriented online service that launched in 1988 as a partnership between Sears and IBM. Users accessed it by dialing into...
Jul 25, 2016 · A younger competitor to CompuServe, Prodigy was a "home computer information service" launched nationally in 1990 by a partnership of Sears and IBM, distinguishing itself with the addition of...
Jul 15, 2014 · By now you may have seen my latest piece for The Atlantic entitled Where Online Services Go When They Die: Rebuilding Prodigy, One Page at a Time. That article describes the genesis of the project while also diving into the technical back story of the Prodigy service.
Feb 18, 2016 · From 1988 to 1996, IBM and Sears jointly operated a graphically rich online service called Prodigy, which allowed users from all over the United States to dial in and view weather, stocks,...
Jul 15, 2014 · Although there were text-only online services before it, what made Prodigy unique was that it was the first online service with a fully graphical, point-and-click user interface.
