Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!seismo!sundc!pitstop!sun!rfm@urth
From: rfm@urth (Rich McAllister)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: information on PRODIGY
Message-ID: <100168@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 20 Apr 89 17:19:04 GMT
References: <9292@mhuxu.UUCP> <161@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu>
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Reply-To: rfm@urth (Rich McAllister)
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In-reply-to: verber@miami.mps.ohio-state.edu (Mark A. Verber)

In article <161@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu>, verber@miami (Mark A. Verber) writes:
>Prodigy is a Sears company.
It's a partnership between Sears and IBM.  (CBS was involved but dropped
out.)

>Prodigy has a pretty sexy frontend that runs on IBM-PCs.

Well, depends what you think is "sexy".  It draws pictures, etc. (like
a weather map) but on the other hand, for text it makes a 2400BPS
connection an a VGA screen show about 12 lines of 40 characters at
an effective rate of <1200BPS.  I guess that it uses NAPLPS or a similar
"videotex" protocol.

>There prices are that low because you have to put up with ads on our
>screen. Whenever new things are being downloaded to your machine, rather
>than getting a spinning clock (a la Mac) or a message "Please Wait" you
>get ads scrolling across your screen (sigh).

Not quite like that;  every "panel" will have a ad "teaser" covering
about the bottom sixth of the screen. If you decide the ad sounds
interesting, you can branch off to look at it and come back to what
you were doing.

I was a "charter member" of Prodigy, getting it for about a year and a
half for FREE.  I would log on about once every two weeks to see
if there was anything interesting, there usually wasn't.  Jon Carroll
called Prodigy "the USA Today of information services -- short stories,
lots of ads, but a great weather map."  The news stories, articles, etc.
tend to be the same level of detail you'd get on CNN Headline News.
For example, the Sports News section covers baseball, basketball, football,
and hockey.  Forget it if you want to find out the Tour de France standings...

However, they did add one service that made me sign up again when they
started charging: American Airlines' fare quote/schedule system "Eaasy
Sabre".  The interface is pretty clunky but it *does* do a good job of
finding low fares -- I then call up the airline and keep asking "isn't there
a $73 fare" until they admit it.  I've saved enough on airfares to pay for
the Prodigy subscription.  Compare this to using the Online OAG on Dow
Jones News Retrieval, which usually ends up costing more than the ticket...

Rich McAllister (rfm@sun.com)