Prodigy up for sale

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errors in this story

this story has so many errors it's hard to know where to begin.


"It was founded in 1984 as a joint venture between IBM, Sears and CBS to market consumer Internet services--a rarity in the earliest days of the Net."

This is false. It was a pre-internet online service like AOL. AOL, compuserve, and Prodigy were all the same ilk -- "closed gardens" to the outside world. Prodigy members could NOT ocmmunicate with non-Prodigy members, whether AOL, CompuServe, or the few academeic and military people who were using that new-fangled internet. When the internet gained mass popularity it threatened these online services business model. They wanted to provide content only to their own subscribers and be able to control the communications, not have the non-Prodidgy subsribers join in. Prodigy rationed e-mail use (which until the mid-90s was only between Prodigy members), charging a penalty for over a certain number per use.


"Four years later, it launched one of the nation's first online services called Prodigy Classic, which offered basic e-mail and discussion groups to consumers."

It was not called Prodigy Classic until the mid-to late 90's. It was just Prodigy. When the internet started gaining popularity around 1994, they reluctantly added Internet access as an add on. You would dial up and connect to Prodigy and you were in their environment, then if you wanted to access something on the WWW, you had to hit a web button to basically launch a web browser. Sending "outside" e-mails was also a pain. They also finally stopped charging penalties for "excess" e-mails. By the late 90s they launched new software called "Prodigy Internet" for those who mainly wanted internet access, but they retained the old model which they called "Prodigy Classic" for those who didn't want to join the revolution.


"Prodigy has one of the longest histories on the Internet, and hit its peak of popularity during the dot-com heyday selling DSL services."

Mostly wrong. Prodigy, along with AOL, was a dial up pioneer. DSL only came into being in the late 90s and was very expensive. Prodigy may have offered DSL, much like Earthlink offers rebranded DSL from phone companies around the country, but Prodigy was never known to be a major DSL force. (Same way AOL tried to sell DSL and stopped.) This reporter read an article saying SBC -- who now owns Prodigy -- was initially going to use Prodigy to sell DSL and made the wrong conclusion -- that Prodigy has DSL expertise. It's SBC that has the DSL expertise and was trying to convert old Prodigy dial-up die hards to join the 21st century.

Posted by: ChazzMatt   Posted on: 12/12/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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