Slashdot Mirror
Prodigy "Classic," We're Going to Miss You
Ralph Wiggam writes "A heartfelt, if somewhat sappy, article about the upcoming demise of Prodigy Classic. It gives credit to Prodigy for pioneering, or attempting to pioneer, things that history will probably not remember it for. Read the Time.com article here, and on October 1, pour some beer on the sidewalk for an old friend." Prodigy was my first online experience beyond local bulletin boards, back in 300 baud modem days. The original Prodigy was clunky as hell, but it was the first service to put "the masses" online. We knew the end was coming. Now we know exactly when. RIP Prodigy.
My last memories of Prodigy ($P$), from years ago, are more negative than positive. Where I lived, they were the _only_ online service available for a local call. I remember the frequently arbitrary censorship on the message boards (all posts had to be approved by moderators before they appeared!) This censorship system was slow, people took to posting the current date and time at the bottom of their messages, so that others could see how long it took to get posted. 1200 bps max when most people had 2400bps modems, then they upgraded to 2400 by the time a great many people had 9600 and 14400 modems. 40 column text everywhere. A half-hour inactivity timeout that applied while you were writing a message (email or public). Run over it, and you lost what you wrote. Lose your modem connection while writing a message and you lose what you wrote. Write an email to an invalid address, and the bounce doesn't give you the ability to re-send it. You have to re-type it. And this is only a tiny sampling of the problems.
As for missing features, notable were no real-time chat, and no internet email access. I believe internet email was later added, at a cost per message. There was 3rd party software available to make up for many missing features - saving messages to a file, for example. Very clever software indeed. (And very slow).
Then they started charging for email within the $P$ system - I think it was 10c each, with a handful "free" each month. Then, they started charging per the hour, even though they *still* had the banner ads up. That's right, dial into their ancient slow modems, and pay per the hour to look at banner ads and wrestle with their slow system.
It seemed great at the time (until they started throwing more fees at us), but when I finally got net access, I realized how worthless $P$ had been. Now the net is going (or has gone) the same way (although not for the same reasons). The Usenet that once existed is dead, destroyed by Usenet spam, fear of email spam, and the huge influx of clueless newbies who have no desire to learn about a society that existed long before they found out about it. And, ease of access has, of course, lowered the bar, so more people of average to below average intelligence are posting. Sigh. The irony is, a service like $P$ is almost starting to make more sense, something private, where the rifraff can be kept out.
Maybe compuserve was there first, but those of us who used it in those halcyon days are still trying desperately to exorcise it from our minds.
Thanks for bringing it up again.
I had known for some time that Prodigy Classic was to be discontinued, but its ending truly is something that will be mourned by long-time online users like me. (sniff)
I still remember getting Prodigy in October 1989 (the San Francisco Bay Area was one of the first release sites). For me, it was truly a revolution--I was able talk with people sometimes thousands of miles away, exchanging ideas. Prodigy--despite what a lot of people think--was a major breakthrough in online communications, because it was all menu-driven and easy to use.
What is interesting is that Prodigy's concepts probably influenced the development of America Online (I'm sure people here remember the first versions for the Macintosh and the Geoworks for PC circa 1990). And it may have played a role in developing the World Wide Web--I can hazard a guess that one Marc Andressen (of Mosaic/Netscape fame) may have looked at the basic tenants of Prodigy when he developed the Mosaic browser for the World Wide Web while at the University of Illinois.
Yes, we all know Prodigy's limitations, but its influence on getting home computer users online is immense. In fact, I'd say even more so than The Source or CompuServe, since before 1989 CompuServe was a text-based online service, almost as hard to use as text-based Internet access in those days.
A true pioneer is gone. But then, we've come a LONG, LONG way for the online experience since 1989.
Raymond in Mountain View, CA
Next week's Jon Katz article will be about the demise of Prodigy Classic; how it spells the downfall of the Net "as we know it"... how geeks should all rally together and keep Prodigy Classic alive; and how Prodigy Classic really, really helped with that whole Buffy censorship thing.
You came along pretty late... Alot of us were on an online service called QuantumLink before Prodigy even existed..1984-1988 or so. QuantumLink was a nationwide online service for Commodore 64 users run by none other than Steve Case of AOL fame.. America Online is what QuantumLink evolved into after the demise of the C64 in 1989 or so... They even kept the same name for the chat room area as they had way back then. "People Connection".
There _are_ older services out there.. Anybody else here remember when Compuserve was a completely text-based UPPERCASE ONLY online service?
Bowie J. Poag
Bowie J. Poag
Prodigy's best feature, and the one that made it unique among early services (like QuantumLink/QLink [AOL], Compuserve, GEnie] was the online Sears catalog. The Sears catalog was, of course, the original "online shopping" experience -- the first time most people bought something without holding it in their hands first. And to service the catalog biz, Sears stores -- which used to be ubiquitous -- would have catalog depots where they would deliver your order. Going online via Prodigy, you could select what you needed, pay for it by credit card, and it would be in the depot practically the next day.
Now, most today would consider that a step backward -- home delivery via FedEx/UPS is the norm -- but some people (like me) are never home to receive packages. There's actually a new trend toward local businesses like convenience stores acting as delivery depots.
Prodigy always was the Avis of online services -- trying harder, never #1. The stuff they were always flamed for -- like the ads -- is commonplace enough today. (The only difference is that with the web, we have freedom of choice.)
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
One of my present-day co-workers was one of the original architects of Quantum's network, and pointed out to me the other day how chat rooms in AOL's People Connection are still limited (by design) to 25 people, a limitation imposed some 15 years ago to keep buffers in people's 300 baud Commodore modems from overflowing with data and disconnecting the user. ;>
He also told me how Steve Case was a lowly Marketing Drone in those days.. Case usually kept to himself, unless he was asking to borrow some money for booze.
All they needed was Chrysler to round out the team.
-Bruce
I have never forgotten their episodes of surreptitiously(sp?) scanning their customers' hard drives for installed software titles and transmitting that information back to their main servers.
actually this whole scare was an example of some anti-prodigy FUD and paranoia.
the info from your hard drive in STAGE.DAT (a cache file for the prodigy code) came about from a bug in prodigy software, and none of this info was ever transmitted back to prodigy.
The bug was a disk cache bug: sometimes prodigy wrote more data to the disk than it had data to write. The result was old information in your cache would be dumped to STAGE.DAT accidentally. But these areas of the file were thought of as "blank space" by the program and were never read.
Prodigy fixed the bug pretty quick.