[Magdalen] testing w/ a new ISP

[Jay Weigel]

I joined St. Sam's in 1997.....wow, that's awhile back! I remember some of
the awful fights on there, and the list being spammed by Sam Bacchiochi. I
migrated to St. Bede's and thence to here. I remember many of those who
have left us that Molly named, some of whom I actually met (Carol and Mary
Jane). Carol and I once determined that we most likely had met in a former
life, at Glen and Ann's of blessed memory, where she hung out as a grad
student at UW-Madison and I waited table. I have met a goodly number of you
in real life and look forward to meeting more of you before I leave this
world for the next one. My life has been blessed by your prayers and
support and also by the laughter and awful puns and sharing of music and
joys. I have a St. Sam's t-shirt (gift of Brudder Jon) which I could fit
myself and at least one other person into and I like to wear it when I work
on my jewelry. It gets a little grubby, but so does life.

People don't understand that life here is just as real as life in the world.

On Wed, Dec 10, 2014 at 8:44 AM, Jim Guthrie <jguthrie at pipeline.com> wrote:

> 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
>