Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!linac!att!pacbell.com!ucsd!casbah.acns.nwu.edu!nucsrl!telecom-request From: hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net (Toby Nixon) Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom Subject: Re: Prodigy: What Does Sears Do? What About IBM? Message-ID: Date: 17 Feb 91 11:06:52 GMT Sender: news@casbah.acns.nwu.edu Organization: Hayes Microcomputer Products, Norcross, GA Lines: 74 Approved: Telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Submissions-To: telecom@eecs.nwu.edu X-Administrivia-To: telecom-request@eecs.nwu.edu X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 11, Issue 128, Message 1 of 9 In article , michels@tramp.colorado. edu (MICHELS DAVID) writes: > Can anyone tell me the story of Prodigy? I don't know everything, but I do know a bit more than you it seems, so I'll try to answer your questions. > I know it is an IBM/Sears joint project. It initially included CBS as well. CBS later wanted out and their share was bought out by IBM and Sears. > What I would like to know is what was contributed by who. > I would imagine, IBM provided the computers, the know how, the telecom > infrastructure, and all other technical aspects, is this true? > What did Sears provide, just cash? Sears provided their vast mass-marketing expertise. Prodigy is almost totally advertiser-funded; you see a little ad displayed on the bottom of every screen, unless the full screen you're looking at happens to have been provided by an advertiser! Sears did the basic market research, focus groups, etc., that resulted in the design of the service, recruited many of the advertisers, etc. -- i.e., handled the commercial, as opposed to technical, aspects of the service. Sears was also the first commercial outlet for the Prodigy Startup Kits (which included a Hayes Personal Modem 1200, later 2400, by the way); you can now get them just about anywhere, of course. IBM, of course, saw Prodigy as a great way to get more PCs into more homes. > Someone told me all the telecom goes thru Tymenet, is this true? I > would have expected IBM to piggy back prodigy data on its National > Physical Network (NPN). Why would they treat Prodigy so independently? Prodigy over Tymnet is a very recent innovation. Prodigy started out with just a couple of cities, and has been spreading slowly as they installed their own nodes. Traffic was indeed carried on IBM's network. But the hardware on which Prodigy runs is much different from a typical packet network, where the network is just a pipeline and all of the data is in the hosts. Prodigy network nodes are very intelligent (IBM Series/1 computers) that have very large databases of screen images. The software you run on your PC does the same thing! Whenever you take an action that would cause a different screen to be displayed, it first looks at your local disk (screen cache), and gets the image from there if possible. If it's not there, it checks the disk at the node. If it's not there, only then does it go all the way across the network to fetch the image from the host computers in White Plains. This staging of images improves the performance considerably, especially on images that don't change very often (menus, etc.) and that are used by others as well. By the way, I might comment on why it is that Prodigy was so concerned about high levels of email traffic. Email on Prodigy CANNOT be staged on the nodes -- it HAS to go all the way to White Plains for every screen. Heavy email traffic saturates the network, which can bring it to its knees very quickly. Email was intended to be an occassional convenience feature, not a primary use of the service. I don't know how Tymnet fits into this. Certainly Tymnet's node processors don't have the ability to cache screens, but maybe still rather than going all the way to White Plains there are distributed caches around the country. I just don't know. But Tymnet access was added by Prodigy in order to expand the user base (probably at the demand of advertisers) much faster than could have been done by the gradual installation of more S/1 Prodigy computers in new cities. Toby Nixon, Principal Engineer | Voice +1-404-449-8791 Telex 151243420 Hayes Microcomputer Products Inc. | Fax +1-404-447-0178 CIS 70271,404 P.O. Box 105203 | UUCP uunet!hayes!tnixon AT&T !tnixon Atlanta, Georgia 30348 USA | Internet hayes!tnixon@uunet.uu.net