THE PROXY HORROR INTERNET SHOW
"Friends don't let friends use Prodigy."
That's one of the oldest quips in my tagline file, but also one of the truest. It was true when Sears 'n' IBM first teamed up in the Personal Computer Stone Age (i.e. the late 1980's), back when Compu$erve was the ne plus ultra of online services, and it's still true today as AOL and MSN compete with each other to gobble up ISP's and net bandwidth. Ten years of fishing for modem carriers, and Prodigy remains The Also-Ran Network.
I tried out Prodigy when it first hit the market circa '87-88 (What? You want exact dates? Sheesh, I can't even remember the names of people I worked with at my last job!) for no other reason than it was free for a month. The original version was a kind of glorified vidtex system, running in CGA resolution and 40x25 text size and with a rotating stream of ad banners at the bottom of the screen. ("Sorta like a lot of Web pages today, huh?" Don't be a smartass...) You had the usual features: E-mail to other members, premium services, on-line purchasing, and regular contributors like SF writer-cum-computer maven Jerry Pournelle.
Once the initial novelty wore off, I found myself twiddling a variety of extremities as each new screen laboriously refreshed. Granted, I wasn't running hotrod hardware (original 6 mHz IBM AT and probably a 1200 baud SmartModem), but the sluglike graphics performance -- coupled with the lack of file downloads (an even bigger omission, in this wares-leech's eyes) -- was more than enough incentive to nuke my membership at month's end.
Fast forward to Da Present. There's a computer in every rumpus ROM -- er, room -- a URL at the bottom of every advert, and twenty-buck-a-month unlimited Web access being offered by everyone and their mother. Prodigy finally shucks off their proprietary network and unveils...Ta daa!...Prodigy Internet! "Try if for a month for free!" OK, sez I, I been trying everyone else's dialup service for the free month, let's see what the big P has.
I'll tell you what they had. The "P," in this case, stood for "proxy server."
For you lay people, that basically means that each and every request you make of the Information Superdriveway -- every URL entered, every link clicked, every smutty Jenny McCarthy GIF downloaded -- got routed through a standalone computer at Prodigy HQ before being sent on its way to/from you. We're talking slooooooooooooow. We're talking turning off graphics display in Internet Explorer as a matter of course. My 28.8 Sportster might as well've been that 1200 baud Hayes I started out with. In fact, I didn't realize how slow Prodigy was until I dumped it and went back to my standy account with AT&T WorldNet. WHAM! Inline graphics popped up at a much more acceptable rate, thenk yew.
If Microsoft's slogan is "Where do want to go today?", I think Prodigy's should be "It doesn't matter where you wanna go -- you're getting routed through Cleveland."
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