Prodigy

The Prodigy Communications Corporation is more popularly known as Prodigy. The company offers a dialup service in United States for personal computers. Prodigy also boasts about being the first consumer online service of the country.

Prodigy was set up in 1980 during the formation of a joint venture between broadcaster CBS and telecommunications firm AT&T in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. This venture was named as Venture One that began functioning with a market research of 100 houses in Ridgewood to determine the interest of the consumers in a Videotex based TV set top device. This set top box enabled the consumers to shop from home along with receiving news on current affairs, sports, and weather.

Under the name of Trintex, which was a joint venture between CBS, IBM, and Sears, Roebuck and Company, Prodigy started functioning independently from February 13th, 1984.

With IBM's PS/1, PS/2, and Hayes Modems and various other consumer oriented computers, a brilliant marketing campaign made millions subscribe to Prodigy services. Soon a national network of POP was build to offer better service. This made the local access numbers available to the customers. And the subscribers only had to pay for the local calls, which were mostly free, instead of paying for the long distance calls.

Some of the services offered by Prodigy are:

• News
• Weather
• Sports
• Shopping for groceries
• Brokerage services
• Banking
• Airline reservations
• Lifestyle features
• Restaurant surveys
• Games
• E-mail
• Bulletin boards