🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <CB.91Mar21124826@...> cb@tamarack12.timbuk (Chris Brewster) writes:
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| I just hooked up to Prodigy for the first time.  [...]  Prodigy is designed
| to be able to run ads and other graphics at any time or location, so it's all
| in graphics mode.  And it has to be legible on systems using even the
| earliest graphic standards, so bulletin boards and other text are done in
| HUGE type at 40 characters/line, 16 lines/screen.  Even with a new 386, the
| whole thing works very slowly.  Since you only get a little bit of text on a
| screen, you have to page down frequently; then you run into the problem of
| pausing as the system redraws the screen over and over (with a different ad
| on EVERY screen!).
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I subscribed to Prodigy for a year, back when it was $10/month.  It's sad to
see that, even though they upped the prices and started rigid censorship of
anything even remotely naughty (making more than one foul-up in the process),
that the quality of the interface hasn't improved any.  Lemme tell you, you
ain't see ugly until you've seen Prodigy on a CGA.

The incessant advertisements are pretty annoying, since they can sometimes
double the amount of time it takes to draw a page, and there's no convenient
way to say "take all this text and store it in a file so I can edit it."
Prodigy is best at being a nifty demo, but I found it virtually impossible to
utilize it in any useful way.  I couldn't make airline reservations (you need a
credit card to do that, and I wasn't about to give my number to a service that
couldn't even pull off a simple bulletin board), the news was pretty much old,
it was slow, and even E-mail was kind of a dog (it was free at the time),
because I couldn't send any outside Prodigy.

They also continued to charge me for some time after I told them to buzz off.

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| Prodigy's news service is a mediocre digest of material that's widely
| available in other, better formats.  The bulletin boards are greatly
| inhibited in tone and content, not just by the graphics-mode problem, but by
| apparently heavy-handed and unpredictable censorship (not just of "bad words"
| and the like, but purely at the censor's whim).  Compared with the
| freewheeling and diverse content of Usenet, Prodigy feels like a
| straitjacket.
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It *is* a straitjacket.  Everything you said is true.  And more---the
"bargains" they claim, the "convenience" they claim . . . all are just
completely stupid claims.  If you have to subscribe to a service of this sort,
use CompuServe or GEnie or something---stay away from Prodigy.

				---Ken McGlothlen
				   mcglk@cpac.washington.edu
				   mcglk@cpac.bitnet