The Prodigy service was my first exposure to the online world, and for many years, I lived a thriving online life on their web forums discussing horror movies and science fiction books with fellow proto-Internet nerds. Watching this vintage ad, I get a bit nostalgic for those days, before emoticons went anthropomorphic and a sarcastic or teasing remark was softened by a <s> or a <g>.
But that’s not to say this isn’t vintage late 80s awfulness. The two businessmen’s conversation is particularly interesting: “I’m making money, I’m making money… with THIS finger,” one enthusiastically says, and waggles. The camera cuts away as his colleague leans in for a sniff.
Could you get pr0n on Prodigy?
Oh my. Prodigy; my first inkling of what existed out beyond FreeCell. I didn’t have it; a friend of mine did and would invite me over to check out the next neat thing he discovered. At least, he did, till we realized how high his phone bill was getting. Ahhh the not so good ol days.
Prodigy was my first experience of the internet. We got it when I was about nine years old- 1990.
My family of five shared a 20 hour a month subscription…. which meant my brothers and I were ‘budgeted’ five hours of online time EACH MONTH, before the hourly overage charge kicked in and we got lectured by my father.
I too remember Prodigy with an air of nostalgia, when Blogs were called BBSs and the internet was a great place to talk about your D&D character.
I’ve got a bunch of retro Prodigy ephemera.
Ahhh, good ole *P
My first jump into the net as well. I remember being so psyched when the actual Win 3.1 client came out rather than just shelling in a DOS window.
In addition to finding other MST nerds on Prodigy, I also recall that they got James Earl Jones to do a sort of interview, in which users submitted questions and he would go through later and answer whichever ones struck his fancy. He answered mine and I thought it was the coolest. The only way I could save things back then was to print the page out on a dot matrix printer.