Prodigy is what got me into programming. While trying to find something to do online, I came across their message boards for game programming.<p>I vividly remember following directions and downloading files to play a game someone else uploaded for QBasic. The first page of code were nothing but comments, so I naively assumed that computers could just "understand" prose and display it on screen.<p>The message boards were extremely helpful (where Red Baron was released!), and even had gurus who wrapped their names with tildes to distinguish themselves.<p>~Eric~
<i>"As we invest more of our lives into the electronic realm, corporate decisions to shut down online services without recourse are beginning to resemble digital acts of Nero burning Rome—cultural history and entire communities are trashed in the process."</i><p>The OA was aged 11 to 18 while using Prodigy. Recent work on memory tends to suggest that particular age range, perhaps up to early 20s, leaves very strong memories - many things are new &c. So this aspect of OAs life has a lot of importance to the OA.<p>In the area I live in, we have, in the last 30 years or so, demolished huge factories and whole vertically integrated industries have vanished or moved south to lower wage countries. Foundaries, lock factories, tool making, car making. Those factories were the site of communities - you spend half your waking lives at work - but they were demolished as quick as anything. Some history survives but not the detail/experience.<p>If anything, digital communities are <i>easier</i> to preserve in the sense that the whole corpus can be captured. Please note I said easier, not easy!
The issue even back then, was data portability. We should do this not only for selfish reasons, but for capturing our history, our discussions and knowledge sources that don't exist anywhere else for history. A small example, tonight I wanted to revisit my comments at the 2010 World Cup that I did at Television Without Pity 4 years ago - But NBCUniversal decided to shut down the site and kept the recaps, but killed the forums, and over 10+ years of TV discussion is lost. So I bet we'd like peeps from the year 2064 to be able to see our Facebook pages to at least understand some of our day-to-day lives for historical reference. Will it be there?
Hey Facebook users! There's a lesson to be learned here; in case you missed it:<p><i>It had no where to go but away. That data was never on the Internet; it existed in a proprietary format on a proprietary network, far out of reach from the technological layman. It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords.</i>
Prodigy got me online when I was about 7 years old. I played some maze game on there on my family's 386 over an expensive 9600 baud modem. I also remembering reading a lot about video game cheat codes on their BBS system ... good times.
Hah, apparently Prodigy got in a bit of trouble over STAGE.DAT.<p><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=stage.dat+inurl%3Atextfiles.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.google.com/search?q=stage.dat+inurl%3Atextfiles....</a>