Pioneering and Unusual Aspects
Prodigy pioneered the concept of Online Communities. A Content Department was responsible for creating and developing different Content Areas for specific topics. Each Content Area had a Prodigy Producer who gave contracts to Prodigy subscribers to assist in running the communities in exchange for a small stipend. Each community consisted of a Website, a Chat Area with different rooms, and a Bulletin Board.
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 end users' computers to minimize networking and server expenses while improving the experience for end users.
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 to the caller for subsequent processing. This approach anticipated such things as Java applets and Javascript. 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. Prodigy patented its implementation (US 5,347,632 et al.) and these patents are, as of this entry, among the most highly cited of all software patents.
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