Replies

Sam, I’m replying privately. I think you and I have conversed before.

I liked your essay and your noting that Prodigy was one of the early participants in “online services.” I was Director of Planning at Prodigy from 1984-1993. Before that, I was an 11 year executive at Sears with my last assignment in the Planning office and a member of the team that evaluated the joint venture with CBS and IBM.

It was a shame that Sears didn’t do more to embrace and adopt Prodigy’s efforts at online services. After all, Sears was a “distribution success story” and it should have recognized the next revolution in distribution (goods, services, information, and communication). Instead Sears treated Prodigy like a wasteful technology effort. One of Prodigy’s primary goals was to provide its monthly service at flat rate of $10/month, so we designed a national network with the goal of giving members local access at an unlimited rate (no long distance charges). So that meant putting ~30 nodes in the Chicago suburbs and as few as a couple of nodes in Atlanta where the local telephone access allowed that kind of networking. During the start-up phase, we were trying to find a path to breakeven that we could follow to a successful new business for the 3 investors.

IBM was a great asset to the partnership but also a major bureaucracy that we had to deal with. First, we had to be headquartered in White Plains (I moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Weston, CT from where I commuted daily to White Plains).

As Prodigy spread its network nationwide, the capital costs were enormous and the run-rate was crazy. I ran the annual strategic planning process and maintained the “model” projecting near and longer term finances. We were generating around $12/month in subscriber fees and services and $10/month in commercial services like advertising, banking, etc. It was difficult trying to keep IBM from overwhelming the process and dictating the direction (we had about 20 Sears people on staff, mostly in subscriber marketing and my small team in planning and finance; CBS was mostly responsible for content development; the IBM team was about 130 people at the peak if I remember right).

I became very discouraged around early 1993 when I could see that our burn rate was leveling off at around $100MM per year (after the initial $1+ billion of start-up investment and networking) and decided that I didn’t think it would end well and I didn’t want to be around to watch it die. So I took a down-sizing ticket that Prodigy was encouraging. Fortunately for me, shortly after my departure, I had the first physical I had had in over 5 years... my doctor found me “profoundly anemic” and ordered tests to find the source of the anemia... turned out to be esophageal cancer which has about a 5% survival rate. But mine was found early enough and I got sent to Sloan Kettering in NYC and the best surgeon in the world for this cancer. So here I am almost 30 years later still surviving.

I have always felt that Sears senior management could be blamed for being so blind to the potential of online services — by 1997-8, the “world wide web” was coming online and the cost of networking was falling quickly but by then, Sears and CBS were giving up on the venture. I think IBM ended up with the network at pretty much no cost to them (gratis from Sears).

It took me about 2 years to recover from my esophageal cancer before I could get started again in a new career. I had a few more investment and business set-backs. And now I’m nearing retirement after working for my daughter’s conservative think tank (Independent Women’s Forum) for the last 10 years.

So it’s been a wild ride of a career. Very disappointing to watch the huge investment made in Prodigy end in tears.

Best regards,

ReleaseTheHounds

That is such a great reply! Thank you for taking the time to write that. Sounds like you had a fascinating career (with all the ups and downs). Also glad to hear that you have recovered from your esophageal cancer. Thirty years later...I would say you beat it!

Like you, I relocated to the Southern Connecticut area for my job. I live just a few towns over from Weston, CT so know the area very well. You might be aware you had a famous neighbor by name of Keith Richards.

Anyway, you brought back more memories of the Prodigy Network. I still remember the TOS very well. It was something like $10/mo for the first 20 hours. After that, you would get billed at rate of $3.60/hr!

That initial 20 hours got used up fast, especially when you were using a 2400 bps modem, which was the speed I first connected to Prodigy at. In fact, this 20-hr limit was such a concern for users that we started using special software to download content so we could read it and response to it offline. Then we would go online and upload everything all at once - grab the new stuff and go back offline again.

I used to spend a lot of time on the Prodigy Bulletin Boards and actually the founders of Free Republic were to be found on the Whitewater BB. Jim Robinson used to post to that all the time until he had enough of the censorship there and started this site here.

Some of us used to spend hours transcribing full newspaper articles to that bulletin board and eventually Prodigy started pulling them down due to copyright concerns. But this was an age where most newspapers did not even have a website to link to so the only way to share an article was to manually type the articles in.

I was active on a lot of other non-political bulletin boards like those for classical music and talk radio. In fact, the Internet was still so small back then that many celebrities would post there and reply back to you as well. I remember having personal discussions with local DJs and talk show hosts. Then as the users got larger in number, the nasty people eventually drove them away. But for a short time in the early to mid 1990s, it was a very civil place and people generally behaved themselves.

Again, this was just 25 years ago but might as well be 100 years ago in terms of how much has changed with technology since.

Below is a screenshot of the login screen for Prodigy. I can still remember my logon ID - it was VJDB54A.

Interesting but not actually a very private post.

I was intrigued by most if not all of it, but your bout with Esophageal Cancer seriously touched me. My brother was diagnosed with that malady when he was still 37 years old.

Doctors estimated that he had 7-9 months to live. Seven weeks following he was dead, just 3 weeks following his 38th birthday. That was in the mid 1990s. I have worked in Health Care and encountered several other Patients and the improvements in the Care were remarkable though your 30 year survival does seem quite remarkable.

I would guess that there was some element of Faith and Prayer involved but you did not mention that.

Anyhow, I am happy for you. You are a fortunate person indeed as near as I can tell.