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Who here used the old school Prodigy in dos?

brad162

Experienced Member
Joined
May 26, 2010
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Tempe, AZ (ASU) / Columbus, OH
hey we were talking about BBS's tonight and somehow we got on the old-school prodigy service (the one that ran in DOS and had no Internet access)

im wondering here if anyone had it, we got it back in '94 with our Gateway 2000 DX 50Mhz machine and the built in 9600bps modem.. we had it until it was shut down in '98. My parents wanted to get rid of it but i remembered begging them to not get rid of it because it's all i pretty much used even though we for some reason had AOL at the time too...

So who all here used it, if anyone?
 
My new 286-12 Packard Bell came with a trial subscription to prodigy, I tried it out (would have been DOS).
 
Yeah, I used it on my 2400 baud modem in the late '80s/early '90s. Apparently they did add Internet access later.

I used all the major national online services at some point in their lives. (Including being a member of The Sierra Network / The ImagiNation Network for the entire life of the service.) Prodigy's vector graphics always made Prodigy the most 'interesting'. (AOL's early DOS versions that were ran on a stripped down GEOS was also interesting to play with.)
 
Yeah, I used it on my 2400 baud modem in the late '80s/early '90s. Apparently they did add Internet access later.

I used all the major national online services at some point in their lives. (Including being a member of The Sierra Network / The ImagiNation Network for the entire life of the service.) Prodigy's vector graphics always made Prodigy the most 'interesting'. (AOL's early DOS versions that were ran on a stripped down GEOS was also interesting to play with.)

yeah i had AOL for DOS installed on the machine installed on there too and used it (since we ended up with both) up until they shut it off in '99. Also on an interesting note, AOL 2.5 still connects (i did TCP/IP, dunno if it can still dial in) and i was able to access crap from '95 that the CEO had published, and most of the old File areas were available including the GOPHER directory and archives... that was interesting to play with.
 
I was one of the flagship customers for Prodigy. I worked for a company where they came out and did a big dog-and-pony show a few months before they launched the service nationally. They handed out subscription packs to those of us who were interested. I went ahead, and used it for several years alongside my shell account that I had to access through TymeNet or something like. The shell account cost money, so the more I could do through Prodigy the better. I think I've still got the box they gave me, I ended up using it for storing floppies or adapters or something.

It was nice to have a free service, the ads weren't too obtrusive. Once you learned to visually filter sales pitches for the Sears catalog and Discover card you hardly noticed them. I dropped it when they wanted me to start paying, though, around 89 or 90 as I recall. By that time I was on The Portal and some other services where I was getting more for my money than Prodigy would give me, even with paid service. And my shell account had added some new features by that time. I had some disk space I could download to when offline, and they got a local node so I could download from them without paying for the time through TymeNet.

But I enjoyed Prodigy for the first few years it was up. I didn't mind the ad-supported model at all, but they never seemed to get a real stable of advertisers on the service.
 
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