[Magdalen] testing w/ a new ISP

[Jim Guthrie]

From: James Oppenheimer-Crawford

>Aside from James Guthrie, I wonder if any others were on the Prodigy site.
>What a bunch that was.

Part of that was one needed to burrow down the rabbit hole to find it. Prodigy 
did not want "religious controversy" so banned the idea of, say, an 
"Anglican/Episcopal? group. So one had to find us in "Anglican Music."

Later I was the SYSOP for the Newsday board on Prodigy -- and the tools were 
primitive enough that I had the power to delete messages on any Prodigy Board. I 
didn’t -- but I sometimes thought about it <g>.

Prodigy was built on the French Minitel system, which dated back to the 1970s. 
Pages were created in XYwrite (an early word processor program) and then 
converted through a Prodigy utility called TTops. Other Utilities were written 
for OS/2 *natch) since IBM was half owner -- the other half was Sears. CBS had 
been in on the original planning, but opted out deciding that there would never 
be an online audience worth going after <g>.

We used to say that Prodigy offered the Consumer Marketing Prowess of IBM with 
all the Innovation of Sears Silvertone electronics.

BTW -- the other interesting thing with their business model was that each 
account offered six users, with the "A" user able to block sites/area/bulletin 
boards from the B-C-D-E-F users. The assumption by IBM and Sears was that Dad 
would install and be the "A" user. But the reality was the teenage or 
pre-teenage boy did the installing and would make himself the "A" user -- so 
could block the folks and siblings from seeing the boards on which he 
participated. IOW -Works like parental control on the cable box.

One of the reasons I was at the top of the list to get rid of at Newsday when 
they closed the NYC edition was that I had set up all the Prodigy Utilities, 
while the management hired a $600/day consultant to install them on everyone 
else's machine without asking internally if anyone knew how to do it. Nearly 
$100,000 later, they discovered I had had all the utilities from the get-go, so 
they decided I was "dangerous."

BTW, the boss at the time was the son of Joyce Randolph, who played Trixie (Ed 
Norton's wife) on the Honeymooners.  He was fired not long after <g>.

Cheers,
Jim Guthrie
RPWP40A