Everybody saw them, everybody referenced them. In an earlier era, we may have spoken about another common cultural experience-say, Buster Keaton films-as a cultural frame of reference for an entire generation. Over its 11-year lifespan, a generation of Americans grew up with Prodigy as part of their shared cultural heritage. It was very much like a microcosm of the modern Internet-if the entire World Wide Web was published by a single company. Prodigy even devoted a portion of the user's screen to graphical banner ads. Prodigy's technology felt like a centralized, parallel universe Internet where technologies looked very, very similar to what we know now but were in fact fundamentally different. Once connected, they could trade emails, participate in online message board discussions, read the daily news, shop for mail-order items, check the weather, stocks, sports scores, play games, and more. Users accessed it by dialing into regional servers with a personal computer and a modem over traditional telephone lines. In this case, the missing cultural repository is Prodigy, a consumer-oriented online service that launched in 1988 as a partnership between Sears and IBM. When any sizable online service disappears, a piece of our civilization's cultural fabric goes with it. "As far as I knew, the only thing I might be able to get is a screenshot of the set-up options dialog."Īnd he did.
History of prodigy app software#
Using a hex editor, Carpenter fiddled with the client software until he found even more graphical data. He knew the sign-on screen was stored on the hard drive, so he began to wonder what else he might find in the client software. "Finding decent color screen shots of Prodigy is nearly impossible," says Carpenter. It was Carpenter's drive to see those graphics once again that got him fiddling with Prodigy clients in late 2012. But I still used Prodigy every single day. "I had already been using the Internet for a couple of years and Prodigy seemed so closed in. "Honestly, I wasn't a huge fan of Prodigy," says Carpenter, a 38 year-old freelance programmer based in Massachusetts, recalling his time on the service around the turn of the 1990s.
History of prodigy app code#
With a little bit of Python code and some old Prodigy software at hand, Carpenter, working alone, recently managed to partially reverse-engineer the Prodigy client and eke out some Prodigy content that was formerly thought to have been lost forever.
History of prodigy app series#
It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords.įifteen years later, a Prodigy enthusiast named Jim Carpenter has found an ingenious way to bring some of that data back from the dead. That data was never on the Internet it existed in a proprietary format on a proprietary network, far out of reach from the technological layman.