Editing Prodigy (online service) (section)

==Innovation==
Prodigy started with flat-rate pricing of $9.95.<ref name="pournelle198807">{{Cite magazine |last=Pournelle |first=Jerry |date=July 1988 |title=Dr. Pournelle vs. The Virus |url=https://archive.org/details/byte-1988-07_202104/page/197/mode/1up?view=theater |access-date=2025-04-12 |magazine=BYTE |pages=197-207}}</ref> When Prodigy moved to per-hour charging for its most popular services in June 1993, tens of thousands of users left the service.

Prodigy was also one of the first online services to offer a user-friendly GUI when competing services, such as CompuServe and [[GEnie]], were still text-based. Prodigy used this graphical capability to deploy advertising, expecting it to result in a significant revenue stream.

Prodigy offered online banking, stock trading, advertising and online shopping <!-- (earlier videotex services had offered these too, for example [[Videotron]] in the early 1980s} --> before the World Wide Web became widely used, but was largely unable to capitalize on these [[First-mover advantage|first-mover]] advantages. Decades later, [[IBM]], which now owns some of the original Prodigy patents, continues to sell licenses for basic ecommerce concepts.<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-13/ibm-wallops-groupon-with-a-vintage-patent|title=IBM Wallops Groupon With a Vintage Patent|last=Nocera|first=Joe|date=2018-08-13|publisher=Bloomberg}}</ref>

Prodigy was a forerunner in caching data on and near users' personal computers to minimize networking and server expenses while improving the experience for users.<ref>U.S. Patent 5,594,910</ref><ref name="Infoworld Nov 15, 1993" />

Prodigy's legacy architecture was novel at the time and anticipated much of current web-browser technology. It leveraged the power of the subscriber's PC to maintain the session state, handle the user interface and process applications formed from data and interpretative [[program object]]s largely pulled from the network when needed. At a time when [[distributed object]]s were handled by [[Remote procedure call|RPC]] equivalents, Prodigy pioneered the concept of returning interpretable, platform-independent objects{{Clarify|date=July 2013}} to the caller for subsequent processing.<ref name="us6199100" /><ref name="us5347632">{{Cite web |url=http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=14&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=filepp.INNM.&OS=IN/filepp&RS=IN/filepp |title=U.S. Patent 5,347,632 |access-date=2007-11-28 |archive-date=2017-02-08 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170208073243/http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=14&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=filepp.INNM.&OS=IN/filepp&RS=IN/filepp |url-status=dead }}</ref> This approach anticipated innovations such as [[Java applet]]s and [[JavaScript]].<ref name="us6199100">{{Cite web |url=http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=7&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=filepp.INNM.&OS=IN/filepp&RS=IN/filepp |title=U.S. Patent 6,199,100 |access-date=2007-11-28 |archive-date=2013-10-22 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131022115439/http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=7&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=filepp.INNM.&OS=IN/filepp&RS=IN/filepp |url-status=dead }}</ref><ref>Riordan, Teresa. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9500E1DD1439F936A35751C0A960958260 "Patents;Prodigy's patent is being debated as a possible threat to Sun Microsystems' Java language."], ''[[The New York Times]]'', February 5, 1996. Accessed November 28, 2007.</ref> Prodigy also helped pioneer true distributed object-oriented client-server implementations as well as incidental innovations such as the equivalent of HTML frames and prefetching technology.<ref name="us6199100" /><ref name="us5347632" /><ref name="us6275852">{{Cite web |url=http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=6&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=filepp.INNM.&OS=IN/filepp&RS=IN/filepp |title=U.S. patent 6,275,852 |access-date=2007-11-28 |archive-date=2017-02-08 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170208073316/http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html&r=6&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=filepp.INNM.&OS=IN/filepp&RS=IN/filepp |url-status=dead }}</ref> Prodigy patented its inventions, which continue to be relevant and valuable.