Prodigy

» see prodigy.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Prodigy was one of the three big online services in the US during the late 1980s and early 1990s. The others were CompuServe and AOL. All three of them did roughly the same thing. You paid a monthly fee, you dialed in over a phone modem, and you got access to a closed garden of services. News, weather, stock quotes, message boards, email to other users on the same service, and a small set of games.

By the time i got online in turkey, around 1997, this whole world was already gone or going. We did not have prodigy here. Turkey did not really have a major commercial dial-up online service equivalent. We just got dropped into the open internet through small isps. So this one is a piece of US online history i mostly know from articles, old screenshots, and people from the US writing about how they first got on the internet.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually was ~

Prodigy launched in 1984 as a joint project between IBM, Sears, and CBS. CBS dropped out early. IBM and Sears kept it going. The product was a closed graphical service, which was unusual at the time. CompuServe was mostly text. Prodigy had pictures. The pictures were ugly and slow to load over a 1200 or 2400 baud modem, but it was something.

The interface had a row of menu options at the bottom: news, weather, sports, finance, shopping, games, mail. You picked one. A new screen loaded over your phone line. There were ads at the bottom of every screen, which was a big complaint at the time. People had paid 13 dollars a month, and the service was still showing them ads. Some things have not changed.

The most famous part of Prodigy was probably the message boards. Hundreds of thousands of people posted on them in the early 1990s. There were political arguments, hobby groups, religious debates, and the usual mix of useful conversation and garbage. For a lot of americans, this was their first experience of being on the internet, even though technically Prodigy was not the internet.

~ the STAGE.DAT problem ~

In 1991 a programmer noticed something. The Prodigy software, when installed on a user's pc, kept a file called STAGE.DAT. This file was used as a cache. The interesting thing was that it was full of fragments of whatever else had been on the user's hard disk before that section was overwritten.

This caused a big scare. People thought Prodigy was scanning their hard drives and uploading the contents. Prodigy denied it. The reality was less dramatic. The cache file just happened to allocate disk space that previously held other data, and that old data was visible if you opened the file with a hex editor. Standard behavior for any software, but the optics were terrible. The story made the news. It is one of the early privacy panics about an online service.

~ how it died ~

Two things killed Prodigy. The open internet, and AOL.

The open internet showed up around 1994 and 1995. Once you could get a regular dial-up isp account and use the actual web, the closed gardens of Prodigy and CompuServe started to feel pointless. You were paying 13 dollars a month for a small slice of curated content, when 20 dollars a month would let you go anywhere on the whole internet.

AOL was the company that handled this transition the best. They opened up access to the real internet through their service. Prodigy tried to do the same with a product called Prodigy Internet in 1996, but they were late, and the service got eaten up by AOL through a series of complicated deals. By 1999 the original Prodigy was over. The brand survived for a while as part of various spanish-language services in latin america through telmex, but the thing that mattered was gone.

~ what it left behind ~

Prodigy is mostly remembered as the second-place online service that lost. It is a reference point in articles about the early days of consumer internet in the US. The same way ICQ is the messenger that came before the messengers people remember, Prodigy is the service that came before AOL became the default.

For a few years it was the most popular online thing in the US. Then it was nothing. The classic life cycle for a 1990s internet company. We have seen it many times since.