Prodigy

The roots of Prodigy date to 1980 when broadcaster CBS and telecommunications firm AT&T Corporation formed a joint venture named Venture One in Fair Lawn, New Jersey. The company conducted a market test of 100 homes in Ridgewood, New Jersey to gauge consumer interest in a Videotex-based TV set-top device that would allow consumers to shop at home and receive news, sports and weather. After concluding the market test, CBS and AT&T took the data and went their separate ways in pursuit of developing and profiting from this market demand.

Prodigy was founded on February 13, 1984 as Trintex, a joint venture including CBS, computer manufacturer IBM and retailer Sears, Roebuck and Company. The company was headed by Theodore Papes, a career IBM executive, until his retirement in 1992. CBS left the venture in 1986 when CBS CEO Tom Wyman was divesting properties outside of CBS's core broadcasting business. The company's service was launched regionally in 1988 in Atlanta, Hartford and San Francisco under the name Prodigy. The marketing rollout plan closely followed IBM's Systems Network Architecture (SNA) network backbone. A nationwide launch developed by ad agency J. Walter Thompson and sister company JWT Direct followed on September 6, 1990.

Subscribers using personal computers initially accessed the Prodigy service over copper wire telephone "POTS" service or X.25 dialup. Prodigy employed 1,200 bit/s modem connections for its initial rollout and offered low-cost 2,400 bit/s internal modems to subscribers at a discount to provide faster service and stabilize the diverse modem market. The host systems used were regionally distributed IBM Series/1 minicomputers managed by central IBM mainframes located in Yorktown Heights, New York.

Thanks to an aggressive media marketing campaign, bundling with various consumer-oriented computers such as IBM's PS/1 and PS/2 as well as various clones and Hayes modems, the Prodigy service soon had more than one million subscribers. To handle the traffic, Prodigy built a national network of POP (points of presence) sites that made local access numbers available for most homes in the U.S. This significantly expanded the service because subscribers were not required to dial long distance to access the service. The subscribers paid only for the local call (usually free), while Prodigy paid for the connection to its national data center in Yorktown.

In 2000, with subscriber growth exploding and brand attributes at an all-time high, Prodigy explored several partnership deals, including what would have been an unprecedented three-way merger with Earthlink and Mindspring. Ultimately, SBC bought a 43% interest in the company, and Prodigy became the exclusive provider to SBC's 77 million high-speed Internet customers. More than a year later after the launch of Prodigy Broadband (conceived and led by Chris Spanos), SBC bought controlling interest for $465 million when Prodigy was the fourth-largest Internet service provider behind America Online, Microsoft's MSN, and EarthLink. Prodigy in 2000 was reported to have 3.1 million subscribers, of which 1.3 million were DSL customers.

Attempts by SBC to sell the Prodigy brand became public knowledge on December 9, 2005.

In late 2006, SBC purchased AT&T Corporation and re-branded itself as AT&T Inc. As of early 2007, there remained within AT&T's Internet operations a small group of former Prodigy employees located in AT&T's Austin, Texas, and White Plains, New York, facilities. What had started 27 years earlier as an AT&T online experiment had come full circle.

Through 2009, the domain www.prodigy.net redirected to my.att.net, which appeared to be a Yahoo!-based content and search portal mainly linking to other online services.