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[ Please welcome Phillip Heller, <\/em>VC&G’s newest contributor, who is a member of the Prodigy Preservation Project<\/a>. Phillip will post more updates on his progress here in the future. –Benj ]<\/em><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> launching sometime in 2005.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n What is particularly interesting about reverse engineering Prodigy is that it was patented<\/a><\/em>, and unlike contemporary patents, the patent is usefully descriptive. When reading the patent and contemplating a reverse engineering effort, I was very surprised to read the following:<\/p>\n The source code for RS 400 is provided as part of this specification. This source code can be found in the application file and is incorporated herein by reference.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, with this knowledge, I sought out the patent application on the USPTO Public PAIR system and retrieved 2,218 pages of pre-ANSI C source code that was probably printed on a dot-matrix printer, is riddled with various patent office “received” stamps and other such things, and has a fair bit of noise precluding an easy OCR job. I have run it through OCR and produced a searchable PDF, which is somewhat helpful – more on this later.<\/p>\n So, with the patent text and source code in hand, I set out to start the reverse engineering effort. Before I get too far into where I’m at, a quick description of how the Prodigy client worked:<\/p>\n So, with that out of the way, here has been my approach to reverse engineering Prodigy:<\/p>\n I’ve done this much, and I could see a Link communications manager 444 is subdivided into modem control and protocol handler units. Modem control (a software function well known to the art) hands the modem specific handshaking that occurs during connect and disconnect. Protocol handler is responsible for transmission and receipt of data packets using the TCS (TRINTEX Communications Subsystem) protocol (which is a variety of OSI link level protocol, also well known to the art).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, at this point I have enough to properly de-encapsulate the login request, and even send back a response that has a properly calculated CRC. But, the login request is an “application message”, likely a data structure passed to that So, now there are some additional steps:<\/p>\nIt’s in the Patents<\/h3>\n
The Steps Ahead<\/h3>\n
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CONFIG.SM<\/code> wherein it would find many configuration options including “object”, which would specify the first Page Template Object<\/code><\/strong>.<\/li>\nProgram Call Segment<\/code><\/strong>.<\/li>\nProgram Call Segment<\/code> would invoke an application written in a language called TBOL<\/code><\/strong> for Trintex Basic Object Language<\/em> (later PAL<\/code><\/strong> for Prodigy Application Language<\/em>; see an example here<\/a>). Such applications were compiled into binary form that was executed by a virtual machine implemented in the client (look for the function tboldrv(...)<\/code><\/strong>)<\/li>\nconnect<\/code><\/strong>, send<\/code>,<\/strong> and receive<\/code><\/strong> among others. The content of the initial send<\/code> was some sort of login request, and the content received from the server by the call to receive<\/code> was likely some sort of login response.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n
ATI<\/code> command. I’ll come back and do PRs to various projects to implement this. \u00a0Subsequent conversation with Jason Overland reveals that\u00a0modem type:NULLMOD<\/code> in CONFIG.SM<\/code> will remove the need for the intermediate modem emulation.<\/li>\nDIA<\/code> protocol serializer and deserializer as described in the Patent and aided by the source.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nDIA FM0<\/code> header within the initial bytes sent by the client, but further encapsulated. I initially missed this in the Patent, but it is described as follows:<\/p>\n\n
TCS<\/code><\/strong> encapsulation. \u00a0This was interesting in that I found the CRC tables in the assembly to have bytes obstructed by aforementioned Patent Office artifacts. \u00a0I was able to find the corresponding bytes in the binary, but it was just as easy to search the web for a few of the bytes, which reveals it is the CRC-16\/X.25 that is helpfully implemented in the python\u00a0crccheck<\/a>\u00a0module.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nsend<\/code> verb I mentioned earlier.<\/p>\n![\"Prodigy](\"https:\/\/www.vintagecomputing.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/01\/a-start...-450x210.png\")
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#define<\/code> that was certainly unset for compilation of the distribution artifacts. \u00a0The transcription is necessary because it is simply too difficult to jump back and forth in the PDF, even with marginally searchable text based on poor OCR results.<\/li>\nrecv<\/code> call in the login process was reading into. As the code lacks debugging symbols, it’ll probably be necessary to disassemble more TBOL programs to understand the uses of that structure such that a proper response can be constructed.<\/li>\nSTAGE.DAT<\/code> file that existed on the client installation media was pre-warmed with certain content, like the login objects described above as well as other content expected to be popular – like weather maps and forecasts, news headlines, etc. Some of these might be possible to recreate with current content.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\nA Couple Shout-Outs<\/h3>\n
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STAGE.DAT<\/code> based on a reading of the patent and code as well.<\/li>\nSTAGE.DAT<\/code> parsing with this, and it is certainly a more fluent way to describe such structures.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n