In this case, the missing cultural repository is Prodigy, a consumer-oriented online service that launched in as a partnership between Sears and IBM. Users accessed it by dialing into regional servers with a personal computer and a modem over traditional telephone lines. Once connected, they could trade emails, participate in online message board discussions, read the daily news, shop for mail-order items, check the weather, stocks, sports scores, play games, and more. Prodigy even devoted a portion of the user's screen to graphical banner ads.
It was very much like a microcosm of the modern Internet—if the entire World Wide Web was published by a single company. Over its year lifespan, a generation of Americans grew up with Prodigy as part of their shared cultural heritage.
In an earlier era, we may have spoken about another common cultural experience—say, Buster Keaton films—as a cultural frame of reference for an entire generation.
Everybody saw them, everybody referenced them. And while Prodigy was nowhere near as popular as Buster Keaton among the general public, hundreds of thousands of people with a computer and a modem in the early s tried Prodigy at least once.
What those early online explorers saw when they logged in was, to them, glorious: colors, fonts, illustrations, and a point-and-click interface—features which, at Prodigy's launch in , were entirely new. Prior to Prodigy, competitors like CompuServe and GEnie forced users to type obtuse commands to get any meaningful result and that result also happened to be a screen full of lifeless text.
NAPLPS was a product of the brief Teletext era of the late s, when TV networks sought to piggyback extra digital information such as weather forecasts or sports scores using something called the "vertical blanking interval" of a TV broadcast signal.
The vertical blanking interval could only hold a small amount of data, so engineers devised a way to present digital color graphics and text in the most economical way possible. The NAPLPS method required a custom piece of hardware or software, commonly called a "terminal" or "client," on the receiving end to receive the drawing instructions and to translate them into an image or page layout on the user's screen. Teletext never caught on in the US although it did flourish in Europe , nor did Videotex, the two-way interactive version of the concept that required remote computers accessed by modem and corresponding terminals hooked to TV sets.
Coming on the heels of Videotex mania, which swept the Western world in the late s and early s, Sears, CBS, and IBM joined together in to craft a Videotex service of its own. They called their partnership Trintex: "Tri" for the three companies, and "tex" for Videotex.
The plan, as conceived from a corporate standpoint, was almost naively simple: the world's largest retailer Sears would provide online shopping. The world's largest media conglomerate CBS would provide content and information, and the world's largest computer company IBM would provide the underlying technology. How the trio got there, however, would turn out to be far more complicated. A very expensive technological effort which, among other minor hiccups, required creating a nationwide proprietary telecommunications network with hundreds of nodes , would end up inadvertently crafting a consumer online world for the everyman that eerily presaged the Internet we know today—if in a Bizarro Superman type way.
Looking back, Prodigy's technology felt like a centralized, parallel universe Internet where technologies looked very, very similar to what we know now but are in fact fundamentally different—like lifting the hoods of two identical-looking cars and finding a diesel engine under one and a gasoline engine under the other.
They both get you there, but in different ways. Even so, the similarities were close enough that patents, legal precedents, and online techniques forged from the Trintex and Prodigy partnerships still loom over the Internet in ways that few in the public understand.
To put the Trintex partnership in modern terms, it was as if Wal-Mart, Comcast, and Apple were to team up today and rewrite the rules of media distribution and general retail commerce. It's a terrifying prospect. But the online landscape back then was raw and rough, undefined and relatively new, so few feared a partnership from such a trinity of giants in And, as giants are wont to do, it took them four years to bring the service to the market.
The remaining pair changed the name from "Trintex" to "Prodigy" to reflect not only the lack of a third partner, but also to reposition the company with a mass-market name that would appeal to the general public. What is it parents often say about their kids — they grow up so fast? That definitely feels the case with Prodigy Education, which has evolved from an undergraduate passion project in to one of the fastest growing and most influential edtech companies in the world.
To those on the outside, Prodigy might look like an overnight success. We want to send a big thank you to everyone who has been part of our journey so far. Prodigy has recently brought its communications package up to snuff, offering a gateway to the Internet and an offline reader for e-mail and bulletin board messages.
And members using Windows will find digital photos replacing some of the service's cartoon- like graphics, renewing hopes that online selling might belatedly live up to expectations. Profitability - an elusive milestone at Prodigy - is months away, rather than years.
But with the service edging into the black, executives believe they have bought themselves a leg to stand on. As one staffer likes to put it, "This is not your father's Prodigy. Still, there is plenty of room for skepticism about whether Prodigy will ever make anyone rich.
Because it focused on sophisticated services, the recent price restructuring directly effected Prodigy's most avid users, and 10 percent of Prodigy's users have moved on to other services. And close to half of Prodigy's users pay on an annual basis, so they have yet to realize that their bills have increased. Furthermore, the venture bets its future on a handful of strategic advantages over other PC-based services and a plan to be the first of those services delivered via cable television.
But there are problems on both fronts, not the least of which, Glatzer concedes, is the need to win back the thousands of online veterans who dumped the service over the years. Technologically, Prodigy may have caught up with the needs of skilled users, but it will have to pull off some public relations miracles to convince the online elite that it is not the devil incarnate.
Meanwhile, Prodigy's advantages are the same as they ever were: a low-cost data network built to handle one million users simultaneously and the most recognized name in the industry. Less than half a decade old, Prodigy is second in number of paying accounts only to CompuServe, which has an 1.
And because Prodigy allows up to six users per household, it can lay claim to two million "members," which bumps it up into first place. Prodigy's national advertising campaign, launched under the slogan "You Gotta Get This Thing," defined online services for much of mainstream America.
They have established themselves as the best-known and arguably the largest online service. Prodigy is a sleeping giant that's slowly waking up. Some outside experts believe, however, that a PC-based information system may never pave a path to prosperity for Prodigy or anyone else.
Though most services are at least modestly profitable, some 45 online companies have extracted little more than a collective yawn from 96 percent of PC owners and 80 percent of modem owners.
Consumers still don't think of the computer as a communications device. The same concerns apply to delivering interactive services through the television.
Though still in the development stage, Prodigy TV is likely to have three components. The first is a Prodigy channel, which would have a look and feel similar to the PC-based service, with some modifications. With a click on the remote control, viewers will be able to summon a pop-up vertical menu along the left side of the screen offering scrollable choices of interactive services.
Prodigy plans to be one such service; others might include an online TV guide. Which other services are available would be determined by local cable companies, not Prodigy. Choosing Prodigy TV will call up the service's familiar menus onscreen, as well as user-initiated ads stripped in across the bottom. The TV-based service will rely heavily on digital photos and full-motion video to replace the PC-based system's online graphics.
A second component might be an optional overlay through which viewers can scan news headlines while watching any other channel. Once summoned - again by remote control - the overlay would appear along the bottom third of the screen, and would offer four horizontally scrollable menu options: news, business, sports, and weather.
Prodigy management was staggered by the cost. Beyond that, what was being discussed in the chat rooms sent the Prodigy censors into fits. Prodigy shut down chat. Bumper stickers and T-shirts carrying the motto "Prodigy Sucks! Hundreds of members waged a nonstop war with anti-Prodigy postings on BBSs and every online service in existence. Prodigy was still losing so much money that it was forced to put per-minute charges on some services.
Ironically, it was around this time that the other commercial online services began experimenting with Prodigy's original pricing scheme: flat-rate charges for basic services and surcharges for premium services. 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. Even more like present-day AOL, it tried to develop its own Web browser, but that flopped.
In , facing Y2K problems, the company turned off the lights. It continued to exist for a decade in various iterations, including an ISP in Mexico. Going to prodigy. Oh, yes: Prodigy made one more mistake. It tried to claim responsibility for inventing the Internet, e-mail, and the online experience in general. To quote a Prodigy release, "Eleven years ago the Internet was just an intangible dream that Prodigy brought to life.
As outrageous as it all was, Prodigy was responsible for introducing millions of people to online services, helping make online advertising acceptable, and creating the concepts of flat rates and multiple user IDs.
Were you one of those who got started with Prodigy? Maybe you started like many did in the 80s on an old-fashioned BBS. Take the poll below and sound off in comments.
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