Prodigy Communications Corporation (Prodigy Services Corp., Prodigy Services Co., Trintex) was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features.
Prodigy was described by the ''New York Times'' as "family-oriented" and one of "the Big Three information services" in 1994.
Initially, subscribers using personal computers accessed the Prodigy service by means of copper wire telephone "
POTS
Pot may refer to:
Containers
* Flowerpot, a container in which plants are cultivated
* Pottery, ceramic ware made by potters
* A type of cookware
Places
* Ken Jones Aerodrome, IATA airport code POT
* Palestinian Occupied Territories, the We ...
" service or X.25dialup. For its initial roll-out, Prodigy used 1,200 bit/s
modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...
connections. To provide faster service and to stabilize the diverse modem market, Prodigy offered low-cost 2,400 bit/s internal modems to subscribers at a discount. The host systems used were regionally distributed IBM Series/1 minicomputers managed by central IBM mainframes located in Yorktown Heights, New York.
The company claimed it was the first consumer online service, citing its graphical user interface and basic architecture as differentiation from CompuServe, which started in 1979 and used a command-line interface.
By 1990, it was the second-largest (and 1993 the largest) online service provider with 465,000 subscribers, trailing only CompuServe's 600,000. Its headquarters were in White Plains, New York until 2000, when it moved to
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...
.
Early history
The roots of Prodigy date to 1980 when broadcaster CBS and telecommunications firm
AT&T Corporation
AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...
formed a joint venture named ''Venture One'' in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. The company conducted a market test of 100 homes in
Ridgewood, New Jersey
Ridgewood is a village in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, its population was 24,958,Videotex-based TV set-top device that would allow consumers to shop at home and receive news, sports, and weather. After concluding the market test, CBS and AT&T took the data and went their separate ways in pursuit of developing and profiting from this market demand.
Prodigy was founded on February 13, 1984, as Trintex, a joint venture between CBS, computer manufacturer IBM, and retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company. The company was headed by Theodore Papes, a career IBM executive, until his retirement in 1992. CBS left the venture in 1986 when CBS CEO Tom Wyman was divesting properties outside of CBS's core broadcasting business. The company's service was launched regionally in 1988 in
Atlanta
Atlanta ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Georgia. It is the seat of Fulton County, the most populous county in Georgia, but its territory falls in both Fulton and DeKalb counties. With a population of 498,71 ...
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
under the name Prodigy. The marketing roll-out plan closely followed IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA) network backbone. A nationwide launch developed by ad agency J. Walter Thompson and sister company JWT Direct (New York) followed on September 6, 1990.
Thanks to an aggressive media marketing campaign, bundling with various consumer-oriented computers such as IBM's PS/1 and
PS/2
The Personal System/2 or PS/2 is IBM's second generation of personal computers. Released in 1987, it officially replaced the IBM PC, XT, AT, and PC Convertible in IBM's lineup. Many of the PS/2's innovations, such as the 16550 UART (serial po ...
Hayes
Hayes may refer to:
* Hayes (surname), including a list of people with the name
** Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th president of the United States
* Hayes (given name)
Businesses
* Hayes Brake, an American designer and manufacturer of disc brakes
* Ha ...
modems, the Prodigy service soon had more than a million subscribers. To handle the traffic, Prodigy built a national network of POP (
points of presence
A point of presence (PoP) is an artificial demarcation point or network interface point between communicating entities. A common example is an ISP point of presence, the local access point that allows users to connect to the Internet with their ...
) sites that made local access numbers available for most homes in the US. This was a major factor in the expansion of the service since subscribers did not have to dial long-distance to access the service. The subscriber only paid for the local call (usually free), while Prodigy paid for the connection to its national data center in Yorktown, New York.
Development
Under the guidance of Henry Heilbrunn, Prodigy developed a fully staffed 24×7 newsroom with editors, writers, and graphic artists intent on building the world's first true online medium. The initial result was that Prodigy pioneered the concept of an online content portal—a single site offering news, weather, sports, communication with other members, and shopping for goods and services such as groceries, general merchandise, brokerage services, and airline reservations. The service provided a number of lifestyle features, including popular syndicated columnists, Zagat restaurant surveys, Consumer Reports articles and test reports, games for kids and adults, in-depth original features called "Timely Topics", bulletin boards moderated by subject matter experts, movie reviews, and e-mail. Working with Heilbrunn in the early stages of Prodigy's design, Bob Bedard pioneered the business model for electronic commerce. Prodigy was the service that launched
ESPN
ESPN (originally an initialism for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) is an American international basic cable sports channel owned by ESPN Inc., owned jointly by The Walt Disney Company (80%) and Hearst Communications (20%). The ...
's online presence.
Prodigy quickly implemented the use of diskette-based application common code modules (predecessor of MS Client Runtime Library (CLR) architecture). These pre-installed diskette-based applications were loaded from the Prodigy Service diskette. These modules then relied upon real-time tokenized data transmitted from Prodigy database servers to drive core Prodigy service functionality on local user PCs. This client-server design worked well, since by staging application-specific and reusable common code modules on Prodigy end-user distribution diskettes, this key design point allowed millisecond "click-to-available-cursor" response times otherwise unachievable in 1986 over slow 1,200-to-2,400 bit/s modems.
The service was presented using a graphical user interface. The Data Object Architecture wrapped vector and incremental point graphics, encoded as per the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax NAPLPS, along with interpretative programs written in the proprietary languages TBOL (Trintex Basic Object Language) and PAL (Prodigy Application Language). NAPLPS grew out of the Canadian Telidon project, becoming an international standard in 1983 after some extensions were added by
AT&T Corporation
AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...
. NAPLPS enabled the display of colors and graphics in support of electronic advertising, publishing and commerce. The initial emphasis was on DOS and later Microsoft Windows. Users could use Apple Macintosh, but the Prodigy screens were not always configured to the Mac standard, resulting in wasted space or cut-off graphics.
Prodigy's initial business model relied more on advertising and online shopping for cash flow than monthly subscriptions. Subscribers were charged a flat monthly fee that provided unlimited access. Initially, a monthly rate was charged for unlimited usage time and 30 personal messages. Subscribers could purchase additional messages. Later, Prodigy divided its service into "Core" and "Plus" sections. Core section usage remained unlimited, but Plus sections were limited by usage time. Subscribers were given a monthly allotment of Plus time. If that time was exceeded, the subscriber incurred additional charges based on usage time. Subscribers could discern what type of section they were in by the blue indicator in the bottom-right corner of the screen.
Prodigy's shopping applications initially underperformed relative to expectations. Reasons for difficulty in online shopping for Prodigy included the perception that online shoppers would pay a premium rather than expect discounts for merchandise. Another reason for poor online merchandising was the nature of the graphics presented due to inherent limitations of technology at the time. Using the early NAPLPS graphic standard, it was not possible to render realistic images of products. As such, while commercial clients with presence on the Prodigy Service might have realized a measure of success with an electronic order blank supporting a print catalog, it was otherwise difficult for online merchants to market products.
Despite these challenges, Prodigy was largely responsible for helping merchants such as
PC Flowers
PC or pc may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* Player character or playable character, a fictional character controlled by a human player, usually in role-playing games or computer games
* '' Port Charles'', an American daytime TV soap opera
* ...
become some of the earliest
e-commerce
E-commerce (electronic commerce) is the activity of electronically buying or selling of products on online services or over the Internet. E-commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain mana ...
success stories. However, revenue from advertising was limited.
By 1993, Prodigy was developing a network architecture that would become known in the modern Internet age as a content delivery network, where the network caches its most frequently accessed content as close as possible to the users. The company sold private versions of this for use within a customer's private corporate network.
Price increases
Two of Prodigy's most popular services turned out to be its message boards and email. Because Prodigy's business model depended on rapidly growing advertising and online shopping revenue, email was developed primarily to aid shopping, not for general communication between users, which is what it became. The message boards resulted in users being connected to the service far longer than projected. This resulted in higher than expected expenses, adversely affecting the service's cash flow and profitability.
To control costs and raise revenue, Prodigy took two separate actions. First, in January 1991, Prodigy modified their basic subscriber plans by allowing only 30 email messages free each month, while charging 25 cents for each additional email message—a policy that was later rescinded. In the summer of 1993, it began charging hourly rates for several of its most popular features, including its most popular feature, the message boards. This policy was later rescinded after tens of thousands of members left the service.
The price increases prompted an increase of "underground IDs" (known as 'UG's for shorthand)—where multiple users shared a single account that they turned into private bulletin boards by using emails that were returned (and therefore not billed) due to invalid email addresses. Those invalid addresses were the simple names of the person or people for whom the messages were intended. When those people signed in and checked the email, they would find "returned" messages with their names. They would then "send" a reply by typing the name of the first sender, which would also be returned. When that person logged on next, they would see their message, and the cycle would repeat.
Prodigy was slow to adopt features that made its rival AOL appealing, such as anonymous handles, and real-time chat.
Eventually, the emergence of the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a ''internetworking, network of networks'' that consists ...
and the
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet.
Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
threatened to leave Prodigy behind.
Conversion to a true ISP
In 1994, Prodigy became the first of the early-generation dialup services to offer full access to the World Wide Web and to offer Web page hosting to its members. Since Prodigy was not a true
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides services for accessing, using, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, non-profit, or otherwise privatel ...
, programs that needed an Internet connection, such as
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
and '' Quake'' multiplayer, could not be used with the service. Prodigy developed its own web browser, but it compared poorly to other mainstream browsers in features.
In 1995/1996 Prodigy hired Ed Bennett and Will Lansing. In 1995 through 1996 Prodigy unveiled several Internet-related products. It debuted its own real-time chat area within the service similar to AOL's. Access to
USENET
Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...
newsgroups was made available to Prodigy members via the Prodigy interface software. Also, Prodigy's first web presence, called Astranet, was released shortly thereafter. Astranet was to be a web-based news and information service and supported in part by advertising, though the site was considered experimental and never fully worked out its offering or business model. Another innovation was Skimmer—a market trial ISP service which became the base for the ''Prodigy Internet''.
In 1996, with Gregory C. Carr as chair, the company retooled itself as a true Internet service provider, making its main offering Internet access branded as ''Prodigy Internet''. This new service featured personalized web content, news alerts to pagers and
Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...
chat. At the same time Prodigy de-emphasized its antiquated proprietary interface and its own editorial content, which were re-badged as Prodigy Classic. Prodigy Classic was discontinued in November 1999 with the official explanation that its aging software was not Y2K compliant. The service had 209,000 members when it was discontinued.
A public company
In 1996, Prodigy was acquired by the former founders of Boston Technology and their new firm
International Wireless
International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations".
International may also refer to:
Music Albums
* ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011
* ''International'' (New Order album), 2002
* ''International'' (The T ...
, with Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú, a principal owner of Telmex, as a minority investor. IBM and Sears sold their interests to this group for $200 million. It was estimated that IBM and Sears had invested more than $1 billion in the service since its founding.
Prodigy continued to operate as before, while Telmex provided Internet access under the Prodigy brand in Mexico and other parts of
Latin America
Latin America or
* french: Amérique Latine, link=no
* ht, Amerik Latin, link=no
* pt, América Latina, link=no, name=a, sometimes referred to as LatAm is a large cultural region in the Americas where Romance languages — languages derived ...
, with some services being provided by Prodigy Communications in the US.
Prodigy went public in 1999, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol PRGY. Later that year, Prodigy entered a strategic partnership with SBC Communications wherein Prodigy would provide Internet services and SBC would provide exclusive sales opportunities and network, particularly DSL, facilities. The strategic partnership also gave SBC a 43% ownership interest in Prodigy.
On November 6, 2001, SBC purchased 100% interest in Prodigy and brought it private. On November 14, 2001, SBC and
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...
br>announced the strategic alliance to create the co-branded SBC Yahoo!. Sometime thereafter, SBC ceased offering new Prodigy accounts, and customers were encouraged to migrate to the SBC Yahoo! product line to the sbc.yahoo.com internet portal, while being able to keep their @Prodigy.net email addresses.
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the county seat, seat and largest city of Travis County, Texas, Travis County, with portions extending into Hays County, Texas, Hays and Williamson County, Texas, Williamson co ...
so it could more closely work with SBC Communications. During that year Prodigy leased of space in the River Place Pointe building in northwest Austin; the building, then under construction, was scheduled to be completed in 2001. Prodigy moved its headquarters in December 2000.
Innovation
Unlike many other competing services, Prodigy started out with flat-rate pricing. When Prodigy moved to per-hour charging for its most popular services in June 1993, tens of thousands of users left the service.
Prodigy was also one of the first online services to offer a user-friendly GUI when competing services, such as CompuServe and GEnie, were still text-based. Prodigy used this graphical capability to deploy advertising, expecting it to result in a significant revenue stream.
Prodigy offered online banking, stock trading, advertising and online shopping before the World Wide Web became widely used, but was largely unable to capitalize on these " early mover" advantages. Decades later, however, IBM continues to sell licenses for basic concepts of ecommerce.
Prodigy was a forerunner in caching data on and near the users' personal computers to minimize networking and server expenses while improving the experience for users.
Prodigy's legacy architecture was novel at the time and anticipated much of current web browser technology. It leveraged the power of the subscriber's PC to maintain session state, handle the user interface, and process applications formed from data and interpretative
program object
Program, programme, programmer, or programming may refer to:
Business and management
* Program management, the process of managing several related projects
* Time management
* Program, a part of planning
Arts and entertainment Audio
* Programm ...
s which were largely pulled from the network when needed. At a time when in the state of the art, distributed objects were handled by
RPC
RPC may refer to:
Science and technology
* Rational polynomial coefficient
* Reactive Plastic Curtain, a carbon-dioxide-absorbing device used in some rebreather breathing sets
* Regional Playback Control, a regional lockout technology for DVDs
* ...
equivalents (remote function calls to well known servers in which final results were returned to the caller), Prodigy pioneered the concept of actually returning interpretable, "platform independent" objects to the caller for subsequent processing. U.S. Patent 5,347,632 /ref> This approach anticipated such things as Java applets and JavaScript. /ref> Prodigy also helped pioneer true distributed object-oriented client-server implementations as well as incidental innovations such as the equivalent of HTML Frames, pre-fetch, etc. /ref> Prodigy patented its implementation (US 5,347,632 et al.) and these patents are highly cited among software patents.
Growth and decline
By 1994, Prodigy became a pioneer in selling "dial-up" connections to the World-Wide Web, and sold hosting services for Web publishers.
As the company shifted from its focus on its exclusive "Prodigy Classic" content and started transitioning to "Prodigy Internet" as an ISP in the late 1990s, Prodigy found itself competing with many other lower-priced ISPs, and the price didn't support the value of the Prodigy Internet exclusive content available for members. In a letter to members, Prodigy explained that upgrades to Prodigy Classic to resolve its Y2K issues were just too expensive, and that it felt investing in Prodigy Internet was the best long term strategy, as many of the popular services offered by Prodigy Classic could be found elsewhere. This decision was consistent with what other online service providers (AOL, CompuServe, MSN) were doing at the time, but with these providers competing primarily on ease of ISP setup rather than exclusive content, the retention value was lost, and many members found more affordable ways to access the online content and services they were used to.
In 1999 the company, now led by a cadre of ex-MCI executives with the goal of turning the brand around, became Prodigy Internet, marketing a full range of services, applications and content, including dial-up and DSL for consumers and small businesses, instant messaging, e-mail, and communities.
In 2000, with subscriber growth exploding and brand attributes at an all-time high, Prodigy explored a number of partnership deals including what would have been an unprecedented three-way merger with Earthlink and Mindspring. Ultimately, SBC bought a 43% interest in the company, and Prodigy became the exclusive provider to SBC's 77 million high-speed Internet customers. More than a year later after the launch of Prodigy Broadband (conceived and led by Chris Spanos), SBC bought controlling interest for $465 million when Prodigy was the fourth-largest Internet service provider behind America Online, Microsoft's MSN, and EarthLink. Prodigy in 2000 was reported to have 3.1 million subscribers of its own, of which 1.3 million were DSL customers.
Attempts by SBC to sell the Prodigy brand became public knowledge on December 9, 2005.
In late 2006, SBC purchased
AT&T Corporation
AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...
and re-branded itself as AT&T Inc. As of early 2007, there remained within AT&T's Internet operations a small group of former Prodigy employees located in AT&T's Austin, Texas, and White Plains, New York, facilities. What had started 27 years earlier as an AT&T online experiment had come full circle.
Through 2009, the domain www.prodigy.net redirected to my.att.net, which appeared to be a
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...
-based content and search portal linking mostly to other online services.
AT&T stopped serving Prodigy-created webpages in 2011, severing yet another tie with the brand.
As of February 24, 2022, www.prodigy.net redirects to https://currently.att.yahoo.com.
Prodigy in Mexico
In Mexico, Prodigy Internet is the main ISP with an estimated 92% of market share. It is also the leader in WiFi (hotspots) and broadband (DSL) access. The broadband service is called Prodigy Infinitum and is available in speeds of 512 kbit/s, 1024 kbit/s, 2048 kbit/s, 4096 kbit/s and 20480 kbit/s. The installation and DSL or fiber optic modem are free and it is no longer necessary to sign a two-year service contract. Prodigy Internet in Mexico is part of Telmex (Teléfonos de México) and its sister company Telnor (Teléfonos del Noroeste).