Prodigy (ISP)
Encyclopedia
Prodigy Communications Corporation (Prodigy Services Corp., Prodigy Services Co., Trintex) was an online service 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.
Initially subscribers using personal computers accessed the Prodigy service by means of POTS
or X.25
dialup. For its initial roll-out, Prodigy supported 1200 bit/s modem
s. In an effort to provide faster service and to stabilize the diverse modem market, Prodigy offered low-cost 2400 bit/s internal modems to subscribers at a discount.
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 online service provider, with 465,000 subscribers trailing only CompuServe
's 600,000. Its headquarters were in White Plains, New York
until 2000, when they moved to Austin, Texas
.
and telecommunications firm AT&T
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
to gauge consumer interest in a 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 of properties outside of CBS's core broadcasting business. The company's service was launched regionally in 1988 in Atlanta
, Hartford
, and San Francisco
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 marketing campaign in the media, bundling with various consumer-oriented computers such as IBM's PS/1
and PS/2
, as well as various clones
and Hayes modems, the Prodigy service soon had more than a million subscribers. To handle that traffic, Prodigy built a national network of POP (points of presence
) sites that made local access numbers available for most homes in the U.S. 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 long distance call to its national data center in Yorktown, New York
.
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 closely with Henry in the early stages of Prodigy's design, Bob Bedard pioneered the business model for electronic commerce. Additionally, Prodigy was also the service that launched ESPN
's online presence.
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 was authored in 1979 by Jerry Soloway and Bill Frezza from Bell Laboratory and Bob Bedard from CBS Laboratory. The team collaborated on this standard to enable the display of colors and graphics in support of electronic advertising, publishing and commerce. The initial emphasis was on DOS
and later Microsoft Windows
. The Apple Macintosh was also supported, 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 limited access. A monthly rate was charged for a set usage time, and any time spent connected to Prodigy exceeding that set usage time was charged to the customer.
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. Additionally, another reason for poor online merchandising was the nature of the graphics presented due to inherit 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 and challenging for online merchants to market products.
Despite these challenges, Prodigy was largely responsible for helping merchants such as PC Flowers become some of the earliest e-commerce success stories. However, revenue from advertising was limited.
In an attempt to control costs and raise revenue, Prodigy undertook two separate actions. First, Prodigy modified their basic subscriber plans by allowing only thirty e-mail messages free each month, while charging 10 cents for each additional e-mail message—a policy that was later rescinded. Then, 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—another policy that was later rescinded, but not before tens of thousands of members left the service.
Prodigy was slow to adopt features that made its rival AOL
appealing, such as anonymous handles
, real-time chat
, and unmoderated bulletin boards.
Eventually, the emergence of the Internet
and the World Wide Web
threatened to leave Prodigy behind.
to its members. Since Prodigy was not a true Internet service provider
, programs that needed an Internet connection, such as Internet Explorer
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, who led the transformation of Prodigy from proprietary service into Internet standard
–based ISP. In 1995 through 1996 Prodigy unveiled several Internet related products. Access to USENET
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, 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 pager
s and Java
chat. At the same time Prodigy de-emphasized its antiquated proprietary interface and its own editorial content, which were rebadged 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 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
, with some services being provided by Prodigy Communications in the United States.
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!
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 {username}@Prodigy.net email addresses.
. Prodigy announced that it was going to renew its lease in the White Plains Plaza in August 1992, occupying all 340000 square foot of space in the building. In 1992 the facility had 1,000 employees.
In 2000 the company announced that it would move its headquarters to Austin, Texas
so it can more closely work with SBC Communications. During that year Prodigy leased 112000 square foot 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.
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, it resulted in tens of thousands of users leaving the service.
Prodigy was also one of the first 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, which it expected would result in a significant revenue stream.
Prodigy offered online banking, stock trading, advertising and online shopping before the advent of the World Wide Web, but was largely unable to capitalize on these "early mover" advantages.
Prodigy was a forerunner in caching data on end users' computers to minimize networking and server expenses while improving the experience for end 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 objects 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 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. This approach anticipated such things as Java applets and Javascript. 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. Prodigy patented its implementation (US 5,347,632 et al.) and these patents are, as of this entry, among the most highly cited of all software patents.
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.
AT&T
no longer actively markets Prodigy services. However, a fair number of customers still use the Prodigy services that were available at the time of the acquisition.
Attempts by SBC to sell the Prodigy brand became public knowledge on December 9, 2005. The brand has yet to find a buyer.
In late 2006, SBC purchased AT&T
and re-branded itself as AT&T
. 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!
-based content and search portal linking mostly to other online services. It still links to that URL today, which currently contains a manual redirect to the new site at www.att.net.
As of June 2011, AT&T no longer supports Prodigy-created webpages, severing yet another tie with the brand.
(hotspots) and broadband (DSL) access. The broadband service is called Prodigy Infinitum and is available in speeds of 512kbits/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 2-year service contract. Prodigy Internet in Mexico is part of Telmex
(Teléfonos de México) and its sister company Telnor
(Teléfonos del Noroeste).
Initially subscribers using personal computers accessed the Prodigy service by means of POTS
Plain old telephone service
Plain old telephone service is the voice-grade telephone service that remains the basic form of residential and small business service connection to the telephone network in many parts of the world....
or X.25
X.25
X.25 is an ITU-T standard protocol suite for packet switched wide area network communication. An X.25 WAN consists of packet-switching exchange nodes as the networking hardware, and leased lines, Plain old telephone service connections or ISDN connections as physical links...
dialup. For its initial roll-out, Prodigy supported 1200 bit/s modem
Modem
A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...
s. In an effort to provide faster service and to stabilize the diverse modem market, Prodigy offered low-cost 2400 bit/s internal modems to subscribers at a discount.
The company claimed it was the first consumer online service, citing its graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
and basic architecture as differentiation from CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
, which started in 1979 and used a command line interface.
By 1990 it was the second-largest online service provider, with 465,000 subscribers trailing only CompuServe
CompuServe
CompuServe was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates...
's 600,000. Its headquarters were in White Plains, New York
White Plains, New York
White Plains is a city and the county seat of Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located in south-central Westchester, about east of the Hudson River and northwest of Long Island Sound...
until 2000, when they moved to Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
.
Early history
The roots of Prodigy date to 1980 when broadcaster CBSCBS
CBS Broadcasting Inc. is a major US commercial broadcasting television network, which started as a radio network. The name is derived from the initials of the network's former name, Columbia Broadcasting System. The network is sometimes referred to as the "Eye Network" in reference to the shape of...
and telecommunications firm AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
formed a joint venture named Venture One in Fair Lawn, New Jersey
Fair Lawn, New Jersey
Fair Lawn is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States and a suburban municipality in the New York City Metropolitan Area. As of the 2010 United States Census, the borough's population was 32,457. Fair Lawn was incorporated as a borough by an Act of the New Jersey Legislature on March...
. The company conducted a market test of 100 homes in Ridgewood, New Jersey
Ridgewood, New Jersey
Ridgewood is a village in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the village population was 24,958. Ridgewood is an affluent suburban bedroom community of New York City, located approximately northwest of Midtown Manhattan.The Village of Ridgewood was...
to gauge consumer interest in a Videotex
Videotex
Videotex was one of the earliest implementations of an "end-user information system". From the late 1970s to mid-1980s, it was used to deliver information to a user in computer-like format, typically to be displayed on a television.In a strict definition, videotex refers to systems that provide...
-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
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
, and retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company
Sears, Roebuck and Company
Sears, officially named Sears, Roebuck and Co., is an American chain of department stores which was founded by Richard Warren Sears and Alvah Curtis Roebuck in the late 19th century...
. 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 of properties outside of CBS's core broadcasting business. The company's service was launched regionally in 1988 in Atlanta
Atlanta, Georgia
Atlanta is the capital and most populous city in the U.S. state of Georgia. According to the 2010 census, Atlanta's population is 420,003. Atlanta is the cultural and economic center of the Atlanta metropolitan area, which is home to 5,268,860 people and is the ninth largest metropolitan area in...
, Hartford
Hartford, Connecticut
Hartford is the capital of the U.S. state of Connecticut. The seat of Hartford County until Connecticut disbanded county government in 1960, it is the second most populous city on New England's largest river, the Connecticut River. As of the 2010 Census, Hartford's population was 124,775, making...
, and San Francisco
San Francisco, California
San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...
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
JWT
JWT is one of the largest advertising agencies in the United States and the fourth-largest in the world. It is one of the key companies of Sir Martin Sorrell's WPP Group and is headquartered in New York. The global agency is led by Worldwide Chairman and Global CEO Bob Jeffrey who took over the...
and sister company JWT Direct (New York) followed on September 6, 1990.
Thanks to an aggressive marketing campaign in the media, bundling with various consumer-oriented computers such as IBM's PS/1
IBM PS/1
The IBM PS/1 was a brand for a line of personal computers and was IBM's return to the home market in 1990, five years after the IBM PCjr. It was replaced by the IBM Aptiva in September 1994.-Position in IBM's PC brands:...
and PS/2
IBM Personal System/2
The Personal System/2 or PS/2 was IBM's third generation of personal computers. The PS/2 line, released to the public in 1987, was created by IBM in an attempt to recapture control of the PC market by introducing an advanced proprietary architecture...
, as well as various clones
IBM PC compatible
IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...
and Hayes modems, the Prodigy service soon had more than a million subscribers. To handle that traffic, Prodigy built a national network of POP (points of presence
Point of presence
A point of presence is an artificial demarcation point or interface point between communications entities. It may include a meet-me-room.In the US, this term became important during the court-ordered breakup of the Bell Telephone system...
) sites that made local access numbers available for most homes in the U.S. 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
Local call
In telephony, the term local call has the following meanings:# Any call using a single switching center; that is, not traveling to another telephone network;# A call made within a local calling area as defined by the local exchange carrier;...
(usually free), while Prodigy paid for the long distance call to its national data center in Yorktown, New York
Yorktown, New York
Yorktown is a town in Westchester County, New York, in the suburbs of New York about north of midtown Manhattan. The town lies on the north border of Westchester County...
.
Development
Under the guidance of Henry Heilbrun, 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 Internet portals—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 ReportsConsumer Reports
Consumer Reports is an American magazine published monthly by Consumers Union since 1936. It publishes reviews and comparisons of consumer products and services based on reporting and results from its in-house testing laboratory. It also publishes cleaning and general buying guides...
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
E-mail
Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
. Working closely with Henry in the early stages of Prodigy's design, Bob Bedard pioneered the business model for electronic commerce. Additionally, Prodigy was also the service that launched ESPN
ESPN
Entertainment and Sports Programming Network, commonly known as ESPN, is an American global cable television network focusing on sports-related programming including live and pre-taped event telecasts, sports talk shows, and other original programming....
's online presence.
The service was presented using a graphical user interface
Graphical user interface
In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...
. The Data Object Architecture wrapped vector and incremental point graphics, encoded as per the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax NAPLPS
NAPLPS
NAPLPS is a graphics language for use originally with videotex and teletext services. NAPLPS was developed from the Telidon system developed in Canada, with a small number of additions from AT&T...
, along with interpretative programs written in the proprietary languages TBOL (Trintex Basic Object Language) and PAL (Prodigy Application Language). NAPLPS was authored in 1979 by Jerry Soloway and Bill Frezza from Bell Laboratory and Bob Bedard from CBS Laboratory. The team collaborated on this standard to enable the display of colors and graphics in support of electronic advertising, publishing and commerce. The initial emphasis was on DOS
DOS
DOS, short for "Disk Operating System", is an acronym for several closely related operating systems that dominated the IBM PC compatible market between 1981 and 1995, or until about 2000 if one includes the partially DOS-based Microsoft Windows versions 95, 98, and Millennium Edition.Related...
and later Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows
Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...
. The Apple Macintosh was also supported, 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 limited access. A monthly rate was charged for a set usage time, and any time spent connected to Prodigy exceeding that set usage time was charged to the customer.
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. Additionally, another reason for poor online merchandising was the nature of the graphics presented due to inherit 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 and challenging for online merchants to market products.
Despite these challenges, Prodigy was largely responsible for helping merchants such as PC Flowers become some of the earliest e-commerce success stories. However, revenue from advertising was limited.
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 in practice 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.In an attempt to control costs and raise revenue, Prodigy undertook two separate actions. First, Prodigy modified their basic subscriber plans by allowing only thirty e-mail messages free each month, while charging 10 cents for each additional e-mail message—a policy that was later rescinded. Then, 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—another policy that was later rescinded, but not before tens of thousands of members left the service.
Prodigy was slow to adopt features that made its rival AOL
AOL
AOL Inc. is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York. Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services...
appealing, such as anonymous handles
User (computing)
A user is an agent, either a human agent or software agent, who uses a computer or network service. A user often has a user account and is identified by a username , screen name , nickname , or handle, which is derived from the identical Citizen's Band radio term.Users are...
, real-time chat
Online chat
Online chat may refer to any kind of communication over the Internet, that offers an instantaneous transmission of text-based messages from sender to receiver, hence the delay for visual access to the sent message shall not hamper the flow of communications in any of the directions...
, and unmoderated bulletin boards.
Eventually, the emergence of the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
and the World Wide Web
World Wide Web
The World Wide Web is a system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet...
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 hostingWeb hosting service
A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own or lease for use by their clients as well as providing Internet...
to its members. Since Prodigy was not a true Internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
, programs that needed an Internet connection, such as Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer
Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...
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, who led the transformation of Prodigy from proprietary service into Internet standard
Internet standard
In computer network engineering, an Internet Standard is a normative specification of a technology or methodology applicable to the Internet. Internet Standards are created and published by the Internet Engineering Task Force .-Overview:...
–based ISP. In 1995 through 1996 Prodigy unveiled several Internet related products. Access to USENET
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
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, 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 pager
Pager
A pager is a simple personal telecommunications device for short messages. A one-way numeric pager can only receive a message consisting of a few digits, typically a phone number that the user is then requested to call...
s and Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
chat. At the same time Prodigy de-emphasized its antiquated proprietary interface and its own editorial content, which were rebadged 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, with Mexican businessman Carlos Slim HelúCarlos Slim Helú
Carlos Slim Helú is a Mexican business magnate and philanthropist who as of 2011 is the richest person in the world, for the second year in a row...
, a principal owner of Telmex
Telmex
Telmex is a telecommunications company headquartered in Mexico City that provides telecommunication products and services in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and other countries in Latin America. In addition to traditional fixed-line telephone service, Telmex also offers Internet access, data,...
, 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
Latin America is a region of the Americas where Romance languages – particularly Spanish and Portuguese, and variably French – are primarily spoken. Latin America has an area of approximately 21,069,500 km² , almost 3.9% of the Earth's surface or 14.1% of its land surface area...
, with some services being provided by Prodigy Communications in the United States.
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
Digital Subscriber Line
Digital subscriber line is a family of technologies that provides digital data transmission over the wires of a local telephone network. DSL originally stood for digital subscriber loop. In telecommunications marketing, the term DSL is widely understood to mean Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line ,...
, 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!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
announced the strategic alliance to create the co-branded SBC Yahoo!
AT&T Yahoo!
AT&T Internet Services is a d/b/a name for 5 companies that provide Internet service.-Companies:The following companies provide AT&T Internet service:*Ameritech Interactive Media Services*Pacific Bell Internet Services...
. 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 {username}@Prodigy.net email addresses.
Headquarters
Prodigy originally had its headquarters in White Plains Plaza in White Plains, New YorkWhite Plains, New York
White Plains is a city and the county seat of Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located in south-central Westchester, about east of the Hudson River and northwest of Long Island Sound...
. Prodigy announced that it was going to renew its lease in the White Plains Plaza in August 1992, occupying all 340000 square foot of space in the building. In 1992 the facility had 1,000 employees.
In 2000 the company announced that it would move its headquarters to Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
so it can more closely work with SBC Communications. During that year Prodigy leased 112000 square foot 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.
Pioneering and unusual aspects
Prodigy pioneered the concept of Online Communities. A Content Department was responsible for creating and developing different Content Areas for specific topics. Each Content Area had a Prodigy Producer who gave contracts to Prodigy subscribers to assist in running the communities in exchange for a small stipend. Each community consisted of a Website, a Chat Area with different rooms, and a Bulletin Board.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, it resulted in tens of thousands of users leaving the service.
Prodigy was also one of the first to offer a user-friendly GUI when competing services, such as CompuServe and GEnie
GEnie
GEnie was an online service created by a General Electric business - GEIS that ran from 1985 through the end of 1999. In 1994, GEnie claimed around 350,000 users. Peak simultaneous usage was around 10,000 users...
, were still text-based. Prodigy used this graphical capability to deploy advertising, which it expected would result in a significant revenue stream.
Prodigy offered online banking, stock trading, advertising and online shopping before the advent of the World Wide Web, but was largely unable to capitalize on these "early mover" advantages.
Prodigy was a forerunner in caching data on end users' computers to minimize networking and server expenses while improving the experience for end 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 objects 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 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. This approach anticipated such things as Java applets and Javascript. 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. Prodigy patented its implementation (US 5,347,632 et al.) and these patents are, as of this entry, among the most highly cited of all software patents.
In the United States
By 1994, Prodigy became a pioneer in selling "dial-up" connections to the World-Wide Web, and sold hosting services for Web publishers.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
EarthLink
EarthLink , is an Internet service provider headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. It claims 1.94 million subscribers.- Business :EarthLink provides a variety of Internet connection types, including dial-up, DSL, satellite, and cable. Both dial-up and high speed Internet access are available...
and Mindspring
MindSpring
MindSpring Enterprise was a major Internet service provider headquartered in Midtown Atlanta, Georgia. Mindspring merged with EarthLink on February 4, 2000, with the company retaining the EarthLink name...
. 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.
AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
no longer actively markets Prodigy services. However, a fair number of customers still use the Prodigy services that were available at the time of the acquisition.
Attempts by SBC to sell the Prodigy brand became public knowledge on December 9, 2005. The brand has yet to find a buyer.
In late 2006, SBC purchased AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
and re-branded itself as AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
. 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
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of :Texas and the seat of Travis County. Located in Central Texas on the eastern edge of the American Southwest, it is the fourth-largest city in Texas and the 14th most populous city in the United States. It was the third-fastest-growing large city in...
, Texas and White Plains, New York
White Plains, New York
White Plains is a city and the county seat of Westchester County, New York, United States. It is located in south-central Westchester, about east of the Hudson River and northwest of Long Island Sound...
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!
Yahoo! Inc. is an American multinational internet corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, United States. The company is perhaps best known for its web portal, search engine , Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Answers, advertising, online mapping ,...
-based content and search portal linking mostly to other online services. It still links to that URL today, which currently contains a manual redirect to the new site at www.att.net.
As of June 2011, AT&T no longer supports Prodigy-created webpages, severing yet another tie with the brand.
In Mexico
In Mexico, Prodigy Internet is the main ISP with an estimated 92% of market share. It is also the leader in WiFiWIFI
WIFI is a radio station broadcasting a brokered format. Licensed to Florence, New Jersey, USA, the station is currently operated by Florence Broadcasting Partners, LLC.This station was previously owned by Real Life Broadcasting...
(hotspots) and broadband (DSL) access. The broadband service is called Prodigy Infinitum and is available in speeds of 512kbits/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 2-year service contract. Prodigy Internet in Mexico is part of Telmex
Telmex
Telmex is a telecommunications company headquartered in Mexico City that provides telecommunication products and services in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Brazil and other countries in Latin America. In addition to traditional fixed-line telephone service, Telmex also offers Internet access, data,...
(Teléfonos de México) and its sister company Telnor
Telnor
Telnor, or Teléfonos del Noroeste is a company providing telephone and internet services since 1981...
(Teléfonos del Noroeste).
See also
- AT&T Yahoo!AT&T Yahoo!AT&T Internet Services is a d/b/a name for 5 companies that provide Internet service.-Companies:The following companies provide AT&T Internet service:*Ameritech Interactive Media Services*Pacific Bell Internet Services...
- formerly SBC Yahoo! - Sears Prodigy
- Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., 1995 WL 323710 , was a controversial 1995 U.S. New York Supreme Court decision which found that online service providers could be held liable for the speech of their users.-Facts:...
- British Telecommunications Plc. v. ProdigyBritish Telecommunications Plc. v. ProdigyBritish Telecommunications Plc. v. Prodigy was a patent infringement case which determined whether a patent related to communications between central computers and their clients was infringed by Internet service providers through hyperlinks...
External links
- My AT&T portal (former Prodigy Internet website, redirects to my.att.net (USA)
- Telmex website (former Mexican Prodigy website (Mexico)
- Screen shots of the Prodigy login screen and games
- Screen shots from Square Off, a Prodigy math game
- Recreation of the Prodigy Mad Maze game (requires Internet Explorer 5+)
- Prodigy Communicate Prodigy Classic Chat Forums (off-line)
- Product Design Document ZiffNet for Prodigy
- Founding Prodigy Chief Created Online Services for Consumers Wall Street Journal obituary for Ted Papes