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. 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 of 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.
Read more about this topic: Prodigy (online Service)
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