{"id":1064,"date":"2014-07-14T05:17:40","date_gmt":"2014-07-14T10:17:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/?p=1064"},"modified":"2014-07-16T10:27:41","modified_gmt":"2014-07-16T15:27:41","slug":"retro-scan-of-the-week-the-new-prodigy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/archives\/1064\/retro-scan-of-the-week-the-new-prodigy","title":{"rendered":"[ Retro Scan of the Week ]<\/span> The New Prodigy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>You can’t see her other hand, but it’s holding a gun!<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

It’s a Prodigy-y week around here thanks to my recent article on The Atlantic<\/a>. So I poked around my scans directory for something Prodigy related, and ka-pow!<\/p>\n

I have yet to see an ad for the pre-ISP Prodigy in any of the magazines in my sizable archive (but then again, most of my computer magazines date from before and after Prodigy’s heyday, with a gap in the middle), but I did find this “New Prodigy” ad from an old issue of Internet World, which I proudly subscribed to for a few years in the mid-1990s.<\/p>\n

Ads like this one represented a new marketing push at time when the company sought to find a new corporate parent<\/a> and shifted its focus to being an ISP (its legacy NAPLPS-flavored content was soon re-branded “Prodigy Classic”).<\/p>\n

By the way, the “original” Prodigy had a wholesome, family-safe, squeaky clean image, with an army of moderators eager to censor any bulletin board postings or even emails (yes, they read, or at least filtered, everyone’s emails) that contained a hint of sexuality, so I find it humorously ironic that the company ultimately resorted to a sexually-charged ad like this one.<\/p>\n

[ From Internet World – February 1996, insert between p.32-33]<\/em><\/center><\/p>\n

Discussion Topic of the Week:<\/strong> Did you meet a romantic partner online prior to the year 2000? (Including those that didn’t involve physical relationships.) Tell us about it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You can’t see her other hand, but it’s holding a gun! It’s a Prodigy-y week around here thanks to my recent article on The Atlantic. So I poked around my scans directory for something Prodigy related, and ka-pow! I have yet to see an ad for the pre-ISP Prodigy in any of the magazines in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,35,27,26,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1064","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bbs-history","category-internet-history","category-regular_features","category-retro-scan-of-the-week","category-computers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1064\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}