[ Phillip Heller is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Here, he writes about his progress since Part 1 in January. –Benj ]

Reverse engineering Prodigy is not without challenges. Though the patent describes the communications protocol and the TBOL language well, it lacks detail of the application protocols – that is, the communications between the Reception System and the server-side applications like Logon, Enrollment, Messaging, and so on.

The progress made last time was to implement the communications protocols and to get the reception system to think it was connecting to the server. Now, we need to move beyond that.

After several months on other projects, I’ve freed up some time, made some significant progress, including successful Reception System login, which I’ll detail below.

[ Continue reading Reverse Engineering Prodigy, Part 2 » ]

[ Please welcome Phillip Heller, VC&G’s newest contributor, who is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project. Phillip will post more updates on his progress here in the future. –Benj ]

Beginning in the mid 1980s, there were a number of online “walled gardens”. Among them were CompuServe, Genie, Delphi, Quantum Link (later PC-Link, AOL, etc), and Prodigy. The latter two were interesting in that they relied on specific client software to access the service.

Quantum Link was certainly novel for the fact that it furnished a graphical online experience for the Commodore 64, and Prodigy was novel for its use of the NAPLPS graphics standard, client-side P-Code virtual-machine, and hierarchical caching. In the early 2000s, some folks nostalgic for Q-Link set out to reverse engineer it, which was a success with Q-Link Reloaded launching sometime in 2005.

It’d be interesting to do a similar thing with Prodigy: To reverse engineer the client and rebuild a mock server with enough functionality to enable those interested to relive another one of the experiences of the early commercial online world. This is the first in a many part series about doing just that.

[ Continue reading Reverse Engineering Prodigy, Part 1 » ]