End of Prodigy Classic

From: Tom Owad <owad_at_applefritter.com>
Date: Tue Sep 7 16:38:13 1999

>Any idea what they are? I seem to recall that the original Compu$erve ran
>on Pr1mes of
>some kind, but no idea what Prodigy used. Vaxen? IBM 370's?

I sure don't know. To tell you the truth, I never even used Prodigy.
Being a Mac user, the service didn't appeal to me - I signed up with AOL
around 1990/91. And then I also ran a local BBS of my own for a little
over two years. I recall talking to a somewhat distant relative a few
years back who was involved with Prodigy. Even then he said how
pitifully old systems were.

Is the Apple II forum on AOL still around? When I quit the service (I
think two years ago - just after the change over to AOL 3.0 and unlimited
access) the forum was still around, but the message boards and chat were
gone, and the software libraries were decaying. With AOL 3.0, the
keyword "Apple II" (or was it "Apple II Forum"?) no longer worked, but
instead a very long line of "http://" garbage was required. I was told
that the Apple II forum was no longer being "supported" and that when the
systems or hard drives died, they were simply thrown out, with no
attempts to recover being made, and nothing backed up. This is why Tom
Turley and company were making such an effort to back up the file
libraries. Of course, this last bit is all according to Mr. Turley.
Take it with however much salt you deem appropriate.

>I'd have to agree, hopefully they will find an honourable retirement with
>someone,
>a museum should be interested, given the significance of the service they
>ran.

I wish I had the space for them. New York's not all that far, for me.
:-)

Tom Owad

---------------------------Applefritter---------------------------
Apple prototypes, Apple II & early Mac clones, and the Compubrick.
------------------<http://www.applefritter.com/>------------------
Received on Tue Sep 07 1999 - 16:38:13 BST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Oct 10 2014 - 23:32:36 BST