User blog:Rushboy70/The history of prodigy part 3

Development	Edit

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 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.

Prodigy quickly realized the implementation 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 technical design-point led to millisecond end-user "click-to-available-cursor" response times otherwise unachievable in 1986 over relatively 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 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 unlimited access. Initially, a monthly rate was charged for an unlimited usage time and 30 personal messages. Subscribers could purchase additional messages for a fee. Later, Prodigy would divide 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 and if that time was exceeded, the subscriber would incur additional charges based on usage time. Subscribers could easily tell what type of section they were in by looking at a 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 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.

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.[8]

Price increases	Edit