Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uwm.edu!ogicse!milton!cpac.washington.edu!mcglk From: mcglk@cpac.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen) Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc Subject: Re: Prodigy Message-ID: Date: 16 Apr 91 23:12:47 GMT References: Sender: news@milton.u.washington.edu (News) Distribution: usa Organization: Dubious. Lines: 49 In-Reply-To: cb@tamarack12.timbuk's message of 21 Mar 91 20:01:16 GMT In article cb@tamarack12.timbuk (Chris Brewster) writes: +---------- | I just hooked up to Prodigy for the first time. [...] Prodigy is designed | to be able to run ads and other graphics at any time or location, so it's all | in graphics mode. And it has to be legible on systems using even the | earliest graphic standards, so bulletin boards and other text are done in | HUGE type at 40 characters/line, 16 lines/screen. Even with a new 386, the | whole thing works very slowly. Since you only get a little bit of text on a | screen, you have to page down frequently; then you run into the problem of | pausing as the system redraws the screen over and over (with a different ad | on EVERY screen!). +---------- I subscribed to Prodigy for a year, back when it was $10/month. It's sad to see that, even though they upped the prices and started rigid censorship of anything even remotely naughty (making more than one foul-up in the process), that the quality of the interface hasn't improved any. Lemme tell you, you ain't see ugly until you've seen Prodigy on a CGA. The incessant advertisements are pretty annoying, since they can sometimes double the amount of time it takes to draw a page, and there's no convenient way to say "take all this text and store it in a file so I can edit it." Prodigy is best at being a nifty demo, but I found it virtually impossible to utilize it in any useful way. I couldn't make airline reservations (you need a credit card to do that, and I wasn't about to give my number to a service that couldn't even pull off a simple bulletin board), the news was pretty much old, it was slow, and even E-mail was kind of a dog (it was free at the time), because I couldn't send any outside Prodigy. They also continued to charge me for some time after I told them to buzz off. +---------- | Prodigy's news service is a mediocre digest of material that's widely | available in other, better formats. The bulletin boards are greatly | inhibited in tone and content, not just by the graphics-mode problem, but by | apparently heavy-handed and unpredictable censorship (not just of "bad words" | and the like, but purely at the censor's whim). Compared with the | freewheeling and diverse content of Usenet, Prodigy feels like a | straitjacket. +---------- It *is* a straitjacket. Everything you said is true. And more---the "bargains" they claim, the "convenience" they claim . . . all are just completely stupid claims. If you have to subscribe to a service of this sort, use CompuServe or GEnie or something---stay away from Prodigy. ---Ken McGlothlen mcglk@cpac.washington.edu mcglk@cpac.bitnet