Prodigy (online service)
| Defunct (Part of AT&T Inc.) | |
| Industry | Telecommunications |
| Founded | February 13, 1984 (as Trintex) |
| Headquarters |
White Plains, New York, U.S. (earlier) Austin, Texas, U.S. |
| Products | Telephone, Internet, Television |
Prodigy Communications Corporation (Prodigy Services Corp., Prodigy Services Co., Trintex) was an online service that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features.
Initially, subscribers using personal computers accessed the Prodigy service by means of copper wire telephone "POTS" service or X.25 dialup. For its initial roll-out, Prodigy supported 1200 bit/s modems. To provide faster service and to stabilize the diverse modem market, Prodigy offered low-cost 2400 bit/s internal modems to subscribers at a discount. The host systems used were regionally distributed IBM Series/1 minicomputers managed by central IBM mainframes located in Yorktown Heights, New York.
The company claimed it was the first consumer online service, citing its graphical user interface and basic architecture as differentiation from CompuServe, which started in 1979 and used a command-line interface.
By 1990 it was the second-largest online service provider, with 465,000 subscribers trailing only CompuServe's 600,000. Its headquarters were in White Plains, New York until 2000, when they moved to Austin, Texas.
The roots of Prodigy date to 1980 when broadcaster CBS and telecommunications firm AT&T Corporation formed a joint venture named Venture One in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. The company conducted a market test of 100 homes in Ridgewood, New Jersey to gauge consumer interest in a Videotex-based TV set-top device that would allow consumers to shop at home and receive news, sports and weather. After concluding the market test, CBS and AT&T took the data and went their separate ways in pursuit of developing and profiting from this market demand.
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