|
Prodigy Communications Corporation (Prodigy Services Corp., Prodigy Services Co., Trintex) was an online service that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features. Initially, subscribers using personal computers accessed the Prodigy service by means of POTS or X.25 dialup. For its initial roll-out, Prodigy supported 1200 bit/s modems. To provide faster service and to stabilize the diverse modem market, Prodigy offered low-cost 2400 bit/s internal modems to subscribers at a discount. The company claimed it was the first consumer online service, citing its graphical user interface and basic architecture as differentiation from CompuServe, which started in 1979 and used a command-line interface. By 1990 it was the second-largest online service provider, with 465,000 subscribers trailing only CompuServe's 600,000.〔Shapiro, Eben. ("THE MEDIA BUSINESS; New Features Are Planned By Prodigy" ), ''The New York Times'', September 6, 1990 (The French Minitel had one million, but was used mainly from passive low-cost ASCII/Teletex terminals). Accessed February 4, 2008. "Prodigy has become the second-largest and fastest-growing computer-information company since it was introduced in 1988. It has 465,000 subscribers, compared with more than 600,000 for Compuserve Information Services, a unit of H & R Block Inc."〕 Its headquarters were in White Plains, New York until 2000, when they moved to Austin, Texas. ==Early history== The roots of Prodigy date to 1980 when broadcaster CBS and telecommunications firm AT&T Corporation formed a joint venture named ''Venture One'' in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. The company conducted a market test of 100 homes in Ridgewood, New Jersey to gauge consumer interest in a Videotex-based TV set-top device that would allow consumers to shop at home and receive news, sports and weather. After concluding the market test, CBS and AT&T took the data and went their separate ways in pursuit of developing and profiting from this market demand. Prodigy was founded on February 13, 1984, as Trintex, a joint venture between CBS, computer manufacturer IBM, and retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company.〔Tom Shea, (Big firms team up on videotex project ), ''Infoworld'', 12 March 1984〕 The company was headed by Theodore Papes, a career IBM executive, until his retirement in 1992. CBS left the venture in 1986 when CBS CEO Tom Wyman was divesting properties outside of CBS's core broadcasting business. The company's service was launched regionally in 1988 in Atlanta, Hartford, and San Francisco under the name Prodigy. The marketing roll-out plan closely followed IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA) network backbone. A nationwide launch developed by ad agency J. Walter Thompson and sister company JWT Direct (New York) followed on September 6, 1990. 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 a 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 US. This was a major factor in the expansion of the service since subscribers did not have to dial long distance to access the service. The subscriber only paid for the local call (usually free), while Prodigy paid for the long distance call to its national data center in Yorktown, New York. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Prodigy (online service)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|