Prodigy was founded on February 13, 1984 as Trintex, a joint venture including CBS, computer manufacturer IBM and retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company.
A nationwide launch developed by ad agency J. Walter Thompson and sister company JWT Direct followed on September 6, 1990.
[10][11] Thanks to an aggressive media marketing campaign, bundling with various consumer-oriented computers such as IBM's PS/1 and PS/2 as well as various clones and Hayes modems, the Prodigy service soon had more than one million subscribers.
To handle the traffic, Prodigy built a national network of POP (points of presence) sites that made local access numbers available for most homes in the U.S.
[12] Under the guidance of Henry Heilbrunn,[13] Prodigy developed a fully staffed 24/7 newsroom with editors, writers and graphic artists intent on building the world's first true online medium.
The initial result was that Prodigy pioneered the concept of an online content portal—a single site offering news, weather, sports, communication with other members and shopping for goods and services such as groceries, general merchandise, brokerage services and airline reservations.
The service provided several lifestyle features, including popular syndicated columnists, Zagat restaurant surveys, Consumer Reports articles and test reports, games for children and adults, in-depth original features called "Timely Topics", bulletin boards moderated by subject matter experts, movie reviews and email.
Working with Heilbrunn in the early stages of Prodigy's design, Bob Bedard pioneered the business model for electronic commerce.
This client-server design worked well; by staging application-specific and reusable common code modules on Prodigy end-user diskettes, millisecond "click-to-available-cursor" response times were achieved that were otherwise unachievable in 1986 over slow 1,200-to-2,400 bit/s modems.
After that, users could use the Apple Macintosh, but some Prodigy screens were not properly configured to the Mac standard, resulting in wasted space or partial graphics.
Prodigy's initial business model relied more on advertising and online shopping for cash flow than on monthly subscriptions.
This was attributed to the company's misperception that online shoppers would pay a premium rather than expect discounts for merchandise and to the product's poor graphics that resulted from the limitations of current technology.
Despite these challenges, Prodigy was primarily responsible for helping merchants such as PC Flowers become some of the earliest e-commerce success stories.
The popularity of Prodigy's message boards caused users to remain connected to the service far longer than had been projected.
Prodigy was slow to adopt features that made its rival AOL appealing, such as anonymous handles and real-time chat.
Access to Usenet newsgroups was made available and Prodigy's first web presence, Astranet, was released shortly afterward.
This new service featured personalized web content, news alerts to pagers, and Java chat.
[10][15] In 1996, Prodigy was acquired by the former founders of Boston Technology and their new firm International Wireless, with Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú, a principal owner of Telmex, as a minority investor.
[19] Prodigy announced plans to renew its lease in August 1992, occupying all 340,000 square feet (32,000 m2) of space in the building.
[20] In 2000, the company announced that it would move its headquarters to Austin, Texas in order to work more closely with SBC Communications.
Decades later, IBM, which now owns some of the original Prodigy patents, continues to sell licenses for basic ecommerce concepts.
It leveraged the power of the subscriber's PC to maintain the session state, handle the user interface and process applications formed from data and interpretative program objects largely pulled from the network when needed.
[27][29] Prodigy also helped pioneer true distributed object-oriented client-server implementations as well as incidental innovations such as the equivalent of HTML frames and prefetching technology.
In 1999 the company, now led by a cadre of ex-MCI executives to turn the brand around, became Prodigy Internet, marketing a full range of services, applications, and content, including dial-up and DSL for consumers and small businesses, instant messaging, e-mail, and communities.
In 2000, with subscriber growth exploding and brand attributes at an all-time high, Prodigy explored several partnership deals, including what would have been an unprecedented three-way merger with Earthlink and Mindspring.
[31] In late 2006, SBC purchased AT&T Corporation and re-branded itself as AT&T Inc. As of early 2007, there remained within AT&T's Internet operations a small group of former Prodigy employees located in AT&T's Austin, Texas, and White Plains, New York, facilities.
Through 2009, the domain www.prodigy.net redirected to my.att.net, which appeared to be a Yahoo!-based content and search portal mainly linking to other online services.
[33] The installation and DSL or fiber optic modem are free and it is no longer necessary to sign a two-year service contract.