Talk:Prodigy (online service)/Archive 1

First graphical dialup online service
Was Prodigy in fact the first graphical dialup online service? I seem to remember from the mid-1980s a service called Quantum Link or QLink that ran on the Commodore 64. This was graphical online service similar to AOL in some ways, with forums and online games. According to the QLink article, that one was launched in 1985, which would make it prior to Prodigy. -- Smerdis of Tlön 16:05, 15 Oct 2003 (UTC)


 * Depends how you define "graphical." Q-Link ran in text mode almost all the time (I think one or two of the games kicked the 64 into bitmapped mode) and relied on the 64's graphics characters, but it definitely was menu-driven and definitely was more user-friendly than Compu$erve. But Prodigy took it a step further, actually using bitmaps. Definitely a quibble, but there were things Q-Link just couldn't do because of that limitation. Not that it wasn't ambitious. Q-Link's resemblance to AOL isn't a coincidence, BTW--it was the same company. -- Dave Farquhar 03:07, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Screenshots
Anybody got any screenshots of the Prodigy interface from the late '80s or early '90s? Google Images turns up nothing, but I bet somebody SOMEWHERE has something like that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.112.42.190 (talk • contribs)


 * I would also love to see some "Plodigy" screenshots. I was on there in the late '80s and made the switch to GEnie around 1990 or so, when Prodigy started charging obscene amounts for e-mail. Can it be fit into the article somewhere that charging 25 cents per sent e-mail was a dumb thing to do?  It cost them a lot of users. -Etoile 05:43, 12 January 2006 (UTC)


 * I found this the other day, while surfing through forums with some people trying to 'guest-a-mate' what will happen to people with Prodigy email addresses still. (Like myself). Someone took a screenshot of the startup screen for the Prodigy software and I THINK--- they merely turned it into login for an old--- Prodigy game MadMaze2.


 * Screenshot: http://pages.prodigy.net/rdbrownmsb/
 * The Game: http://pages.prodigy.net/rdbrownmsb/MadMaze2/index.htm


 * Prodigy homepages area: http://pages.prodigy.net/


 * Other than the above, there aren't many areas of Prodigy that are still up. www.prodigy.excite.com has been long gone. P.s. have you all seen www.Archive.org?  http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.prodigy.com/
 * CaribDigita 13:18, 12 January 2006 (UTC)
 * I found some great pages with a couple of screenshots! Check out Prodigy's Legacy and Member Memories.  A couple of black and white screenshots here too. -Etoile 01:50, 3 March 2006 (UTC)
 * Here are some more screenshots: News Highlights screen and the Mac version of Prodigy. Just seeing that hideous interface brings back bad memories. Prodigy was our first "internet" service, and we used it from 1995-1996, but swtiched to AOL since they not only had a Mac web browser, but their software actually used the Mac GUI and hence was faster. --Birdhombre 15:55, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

What were they thinking?
There were problems with its "shut up and shop" premise that the article doesn't discuss.

First of all, the shopping sites, notably Sears, did not have any pictures of the merchandise at all. The NAPLPS protocol wouldn't have been capable of delivering good pictures anyway, and apparently nobody bothered to develop technology to transform images into even approximate NAPLPS representations.

Second of all, the shopping sites, while boasting big brand names, did not carry anything like a substantial fraction of the wares offered by the vendor. Today, you take it for granted that your selection on the Internet is going to be wider than in a brick-and-mortar store. Back then, it was a joke. I doubt that as many as a thousand Sears items were available through Prodigy.

My daughter was a teenager at the time. I remember her being intrigued by Prodigy. She wanted a new swimming suit, and clicked her way down through Sears and found... exactly one swimming suit. It was made by Gottex, it cost $80 (equivalent to about $130 today), and there was no picture. I don't remember what was covered in the text description, but it fit on a single page... of big, blocky letters... at CGA resolution. Can you imagine? Prodigy expected people to buy an $80 bathing suit with no picture? What were they thinking? Dpbsmith (talk) 19:25, 24 January 2006 (UTC)
 * In fact NAPLPS did (does?) support increment point drawing which allows you to do pictures that are roughly equivalent to bit mapped images. However the amount of data that had to be transmitted was much greater than the vector drawing that Prodigy generally used. Please remember a few things: 1) Bandwidth: at the time Prodigy was designed the prevalent speed of modems was 300 baud. That's about 300 bits per second...which is roughly 35 characters per second. At the time Prodigy was released modem speeds had increased to 1200 baud/second, still only 130 characters per second. Imagine waiting minutes for an image to paint on your screen. Nowadays, with millions of bits of bandwidth available to most consumers it's easy to forget the humble beginnings and constrained technology of just a few years ago. Prodigy did make extensive use of NAPLPS vector graphics which allowed for extremely efficient use of the datastream. 2) New business model. There was a natural tension between the "brick and mortar" Sears folks, the Sears Catalog folks, and Prodigy. The hard-copy Sears catalog was an iconic, powerful, and jealous institution. Online catalogs were viewed skeptically within that community. So Prodigy was on the bleeding edge in terms of both technology and business model and was answerable to a corporate board of members from IBM, Sears, and CBS, each of whom had their own agenda which may not have been aligned to Prodigy's best interests. P.S.Prodigy did help realize improvements in bandwidth, for instance it pioneered the use of CATV as a delivery mechanism. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.34.20.19 (talk • contribs)