User blog:Rushboy70/Prodigy history part 7

Headquarters

Prodigy originally had its headquarters in White Plains Plaza in White Plains, New York.[13] Prodigy announced that it was going to renew its lease in the White Plains Plaza in August 1992, occupying all 340,000 square feet (32,000 m2) of space in the building.[14][15] In 1992 the facility had 1,000 employees.[14]

In 2000 the company announced that it would move its headquarters to Austin, Texas so it could more closely work with SBC Communications.[16] During that year Prodigy leased 112,000 square feet (10,400 m2) of space in the River Place Pointe building in northwest Austin; the building, then under construction, was scheduled to be completed in 2001.[17] Prodigy moved its headquarters in December 2000.[18]

Innovation

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, tens of thousands of users left the service.

Prodigy was also one of the first online services 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 World Wide Web became widely used, but was largely unable to capitalize on these "early mover" advantages.

Prodigy was a forerunner in caching data on and near the users' personal computers to minimize networking and server expenses while improving the experience for users.[19][8]

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[clarification needed] to the caller for subsequent processing.[20][21] This approach anticipated such things as Java applets and Javascript.[20][22] 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.[20][21][23] Prodigy patented its implementation (US 5,347,632 et al.) and these patents are highly cited among software patents.