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106-501: GEnie was founded by Bill Louden on October 1, 1985 and was launched as an ASCII text-based service by GE's Information Services division in October 1985, and received attention as the first serious commercial competition to CompuServe . Louden was originally CompuServe's product manager for Computing, Community (forums), Games, eCommerce, and email product lines. Louden purchased DECWAR source code and had MegaWars developed, one of

212-448: 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

318-529: A shift function (like in ITA2 ), which would allow more than 64 codes to be represented by a six-bit code . In a shifted code, some character codes determine choices between options for the following character codes. It allows compact encoding, but is less reliable for data transmission , as an error in transmitting the shift code typically makes a long part of the transmission unreadable. The standards committee decided against shifting, and so ASCII required at least

424-403: 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

530-569: A 43% ownership interest in Prodigy. On November 6, 2001, SBC purchased 100% interest in Prodigy and brought it private. On November 14, 2001, SBC and Yahoo! announced the strategic alliance to create the cobranded SBC Yahoo! . Sometime after that, SBC ceased offering new Prodigy accounts, and customers were encouraged to migrate to the SBC Yahoo! product line while maintaining their existing Prodigy email addresses. Prodigy's first headquarters

636-522: A BS (backspace). Instead, there was a key marked RUB OUT that sent code 127 (DEL). The purpose of this key was to erase mistakes in a manually-input paper tape: the operator had to push a button on the tape punch to back it up, then type the rubout, which punched all holes and replaced the mistake with a character that was intended to be ignored. Teletypes were commonly used with the less-expensive computers from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC); these systems had to use what keys were available, and thus

742-474: A Library for permanent files. They were part of an online community culture that predated the Internet's emergence as a mass medium, which also included such separate entities as CompuServe forums, Usenet newsgroups and email mailing lists . Most RoundTables were actually operated not by GEnie employees but by remote working independent contractors , which was standard practice for online services at

848-458: A character count followed by the characters of the line and which used EBCDIC rather than ASCII encoding. The Telnet protocol defined an ASCII "Network Virtual Terminal" (NVT), so that connections between hosts with different line-ending conventions and character sets could be supported by transmitting a standard text format over the network. Telnet used ASCII along with CR-LF line endings, and software using other conventions would translate between

954-426: A flat monthly fee that provided unlimited access. Initially, a monthly rate was set for unlimited usage time and 30 personal messages. In addition, subscribers could purchase additional messages. Later, Prodigy divided its service into "Core" and "Plus" sections. Core section usage remained unlimited, but Plus sections were limited by usage time. Subscribers were afforded a monthly allotment of Plus time, but if that time

1060-570: A letter to members, Prodigy explained that upgrades to Prodigy Classic to resolve its Y2K issues were just too expensive and that it felt investing in Prodigy Internet was the best long-term strategy, as many of the popular services offered by Prodigy Classic could be found elsewhere. This decision was consistent with what other online service providers (AOL, CompuServe, MSN) were doing at the time. Still, with these providers competing primarily on ease of ISP setup rather than exclusive content,

1166-498: A line terminator. The tty driver would handle the LF to CRLF conversion on output so files can be directly printed to terminal, and NL (newline) is often used to refer to CRLF in UNIX documents. Unix and Unix-like systems, and Amiga systems, adopted this convention from Multics. On the other hand, the original Macintosh OS , Apple DOS , and ProDOS used carriage return (CR) alone as

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1272-605: A line terminator; however, since Apple later replaced these obsolete operating systems with their Unix-based macOS (formerly named OS X) operating system, they now use line feed (LF) as well. The Radio Shack TRS-80 also used a lone CR to terminate lines. Computers attached to the ARPANET included machines running operating systems such as TOPS-10 and TENEX using CR-LF line endings; machines running operating systems such as Multics using LF line endings; and machines running operating systems such as OS/360 that represented lines as

1378-550: A page number associated with it, akin to a Web address today; typing "m 1335", for instance, would bring you to the GemStone III game page. The service included RTs, games, mail and shopping. For some time, GEnie published a bimonthly print magazine, LiveWire . GEnie's early chat room was called the LiveWire CB Simulator, after the citizens' band radios popular at the time. GEnie had a reputation for being

1484-557: A pioneer in selling "dial-up" connections to the World Wide Web and sold hosting services for Web publishers. Prodigy regularly became the focus of discussions on The Howard Stern Show in the mid-nineties. Numerous shows were devoted to it. In addition, Howard met face-to-face with people he had talked to in Prodigy chat groups under a pseudonym. Howard was the most prominent radio name in America, gaining excellent ratings at

1590-403: A policy that was later rescinded. In the summer of 1993, it began charging hourly rates for several of its most popular features, including its most popular feature, the message boards. This policy was later rescinded after tens of thousands of members left the service. The price increases prompted an increase of "underground IDs" by which multiple users would share a single account and manipulate

1696-600: A reserved device control (DC0), synchronous idle (SYNC), and acknowledge (ACK). These were positioned to maximize the Hamming distance between their bit patterns. ASCII-code order is also called ASCIIbetical order. Collation of data is sometimes done in this order rather than "standard" alphabetical order ( collating sequence ). The main deviations in ASCII order are: An intermediate order converts uppercase letters to lowercase before comparing ASCII values. ASCII reserves

1802-541: A reserved meaning. Over time this interpretation has been co-opted and has eventually been changed. In modern usage, an ESC sent to the terminal usually indicates the start of a command sequence, which can be used to address the cursor, scroll a region, set/query various terminal properties, and more. They are usually in the form of a so-called " ANSI escape code " (often starting with a " Control Sequence Introducer ", "CSI", " ESC [ ") from ECMA-48 (1972) and its successors. Some escape sequences do not have introducers, like

1908-564: A return of the message. Prodigy was slow to adopt features that made its rival AOL appealing, such as anonymous handles and real-time chat . Eventually, the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web threatened to leave Prodigy behind. In 1994, Prodigy became the first of the early-generation dialup services to offer full access to the World Wide Web and to offer Web page hosting to its members. However, since Prodigy

2014-404: A seven-bit code. The committee considered an eight-bit code, since eight bits ( octets ) would allow two four-bit patterns to efficiently encode two digits with binary-coded decimal . However, it would require all data transmission to send eight bits when seven could suffice. The committee voted to use a seven-bit code to minimize costs associated with data transmission. Since perforated tape at

2120-399: A terminal. Some operating systems such as CP/M tracked file length only in units of disk blocks, and used control-Z to mark the end of the actual text in the file. For these reasons, EOF, or end-of-file , was used colloquially and conventionally as a three-letter acronym for control-Z instead of SUBstitute. The end-of-text character ( ETX ), also known as control-C , was inappropriate for

2226-449: A variety of reasons, while using control-Z as the control character to end a file is analogous to the letter Z's position at the end of the alphabet, and serves as a very convenient mnemonic aid . A historically common and still prevalent convention uses the ETX character convention to interrupt and halt a program via an input data stream, usually from a keyboard. The Unix terminal driver uses

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2332-737: Is 0101 in binary). Many of the non-alphanumeric characters were positioned to correspond to their shifted position on typewriters; an important subtlety is that these were based on mechanical typewriters, not electric typewriters. Mechanical typewriters followed the de facto standard set by the Remington No. 2 (1878), the first typewriter with a shift key, and the shifted values of 23456789- were "#$ %_&'()  – early typewriters omitted 0 and 1 , using O (capital letter o ) and l (lowercase letter L ) instead, but 1! and 0) pairs became standard once 0 and 1 became common. Thus, in ASCII !"#$ % were placed in

2438-400: Is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment , and other devices. ASCII has just 128 code points , of which only 95 are printable characters , which severely limit its scope. The set of available punctuation had significant impact on the syntax of computer languages and text markup. ASCII hugely influenced

2544-427: Is replaced by a second control-S to resume output. The 33 ASR also could be configured to employ control-R (DC2) and control-T (DC4) to start and stop the tape punch; on some units equipped with this function, the corresponding control character lettering on the keycap above the letter was TAPE and TAPE respectively. The Teletype could not move its typehead backwards, so it did not have a key on its keyboard to send

2650-404: Is the newline problem on various operating systems . Teletype machines required that a line of text be terminated with both "carriage return" (which moves the printhead to the beginning of the line) and "line feed" (which advances the paper one line without moving the printhead). The name "carriage return" comes from the fact that on a manual typewriter the carriage holding the paper moves while

2756-503: The Comité Consultatif International Téléphonique et Télégraphique (CCITT) International Telegraph Alphabet No. 2 (ITA2) standard of 1932, FIELDATA (1956 ), and early EBCDIC (1963), more than 64 codes were required for ASCII. ITA2 was in turn based on Baudot code , the 5-bit telegraph code Émile Baudot invented in 1870 and patented in 1874. The committee debated the possibility of

2862-636: The Teletype Model 33 , which used the left-shifted layout corresponding to ASCII, differently from traditional mechanical typewriters. Electric typewriters, notably the IBM Selectric (1961), used a somewhat different layout that has become de facto standard on computers – following the IBM PC (1981), especially Model M (1984) – and thus shift values for symbols on modern keyboards do not correspond as closely to

2968-730: The United States Federal Government support ASCII, stating: I have also approved recommendations of the Secretary of Commerce [ Luther H. Hodges ] regarding standards for recording the Standard Code for Information Interchange on magnetic tapes and paper tapes when they are used in computer operations. All computers and related equipment configurations brought into the Federal Government inventory on and after July 1, 1969, must have

3074-667: The carriage return , line feed , and tab codes. For example, lowercase i would be represented in the ASCII encoding by binary 1101001 = hexadecimal 69 ( i is the ninth letter) = decimal 105. Despite being an American standard, ASCII does not have a code point for the cent (¢). It also does not support English terms with diacritical marks such as résumé and jalapeño , or proper nouns with diacritical marks such as Beyoncé (although on certain devices characters could be combined with punctuation such as Tilde (~) and Backtick (`) to approximate such characters.) The American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII)

3180-645: The "Reset to Initial State", "RIS" command " ESC c ". In contrast, an ESC read from the terminal is most often used as an out-of-band character used to terminate an operation or special mode, as in the TECO and vi text editors . In graphical user interface (GUI) and windowing systems, ESC generally causes an application to abort its current operation or to exit (terminate) altogether. The inherent ambiguity of many control characters, combined with their historical usage, created problems when transferring "plain text" files between systems. The best example of this

3286-582: The "help" prefix command in GNU Emacs . Many more of the control characters have been assigned meanings quite different from their original ones. The "escape" character (ESC, code 27), for example, was intended originally to allow sending of other control characters as literals instead of invoking their meaning, an "escape sequence". This is the same meaning of "escape" encountered in URL encodings, C language strings, and other systems where certain characters have

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3392-401: The "line feed" function (which causes a printer to advance its paper), and character 8 represents " backspace ". RFC   2822 refers to control characters that do not include carriage return, line feed or white space as non-whitespace control characters. Except for the control characters that prescribe elementary line-oriented formatting, ASCII does not define any mechanism for describing

3498-613: The 1990s. The company claimed it was the first consumer online service, citing its graphical user interface and basic architecture as differentiation from CompuServe , which started in 1979 and used a command-line interface . Prodigy was described by the New York Times as "family-oriented" and one of "the Big Three information services" in 1994. By 1990, it was the second-largest online service provider with 465,000 subscribers, trailing only CompuServe 's 600,000. In 1993 it

3604-419: The ASCII chart in this article. Ninety-five of the encoded characters are printable: these include the digits 0 to 9 , lowercase letters a to z , uppercase letters A to Z , and punctuation symbols . In addition, the original ASCII specification included 33 non-printing control codes which originated with Teletype models ; most of these are now obsolete, although a few are still commonly used, such as

3710-679: The ASCII table as earlier keyboards did. The /? pair also dates to the No. 2, and the ,< .> pairs were used on some keyboards (others, including the No. 2, did not shift , (comma) or . (full stop) so they could be used in uppercase without unshifting). However, ASCII split the ;: pair (dating to No. 2), and rearranged mathematical symbols (varied conventions, commonly -* =+ ) to :* ;+ -= . Some then-common typewriter characters were not included, notably ½ ¼ ¢ , while ^ ` ~ were included as diacritics for international use, and < > for mathematical use, together with

3816-470: The DEL character was assigned to erase the previous character. Because of this, DEC video terminals (by default) sent the DEL character for the key marked "Backspace" while the separate key marked "Delete" sent an escape sequence ; many other competing terminals sent a BS character for the backspace key. The early Unix tty drivers, unlike some modern implementations, allowed only one character to be set to erase

3922-706: 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,

4028-434: 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

4134-576: The River Place Pointe building in northwest Austin; the building, then under construction, was scheduled to be completed in 2001. Prodigy moved its headquarters in December 2000. Unlike many other competing services, Prodigy started with flat-rate pricing. When Prodigy moved to per-hour charging for its most popular services in June 1993, tens of thousands of users left the service. Prodigy

4240-469: The Teletype Model 33 machine assignments for codes 17 (control-Q, DC1, also known as XON), 19 (control-S, DC3, also known as XOFF), and 127 ( delete ) became de facto standards. The Model 33 was also notable for taking the description of control-G (code 7, BEL, meaning audibly alert the operator) literally, as the unit contained an actual bell which it rang when it received a BEL character. Because

4346-701: The Teletype Model 35 as a seven- bit teleprinter code promoted by Bell data services. Work on the ASCII standard began in May 1961, with the first meeting of the American Standards Association's (ASA) (now the American National Standards Institute or ANSI) X3.2 subcommittee. The first edition of the standard was published in 1963, underwent a major revision during 1967, and experienced its most recent update during 1986. Compared to earlier telegraph codes,

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4452-629: The Top page, became unavailable slightly before midnight on December 30, 1999. Several books, TV shows, films and other projects had their genesis and inspiration on GEnie. One example is the Babylon 5 television show, created by J. Michael Straczynski , which was first announced publicly in GEnie's Science Fiction RoundTables. The SFRTs served as the show's first online "home" and were the source of many in-jokes and references throughout its run. Bill Louden,

4558-461: The aging software was not Y2K compliant. The service had 209,000 members when it was discontinued. In 1996, Prodigy was acquired by the former founders of Boston Technology and their new firm International Wireless, with Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú , a principal owner of Telmex , as a minority investor. IBM and Sears sold their interests to the group for $ 200 million. It was estimated that IBM and Sears had invested more than $ 1 billion in

4664-534: The all-uppercase "GE") to an Internet service provider , but ultimately failed. IDT also funded the development of a GUI for the text-based service; this client was actually released, but the service did not survive long enough for it to become popular. Visitors to GEnie dropped with the growth of other online services and fell dramatically following a very sudden change in the fee structure in 1996. The users were notified with only 12 hours' notice that all Basic (flat-rate) services would cease to exist, while prices of

4770-417: The caller for subsequent processing. This approach anticipated innovations such as Java applets and JavaScript . 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. Prodigy patented its inventions, which continue to be relevant and valuable. By 1994, Prodigy became

4876-400: The capability to use the Standard Code for Information Interchange and the formats prescribed by the magnetic tape and paper tape standards when these media are used. Prodigy (ISP) Prodigy Communications Corporation was an online service from 1984 to 2001 that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services. It was one of the major internet service providers of

4982-585: The change into its draft standard. The X3.2.4 task group voted its approval for the change to ASCII at its May 1963 meeting. Locating the lowercase letters in sticks 6 and 7 caused the characters to differ in bit pattern from the upper case by a single bit, which simplified case-insensitive character matching and the construction of keyboards and printers. The X3 committee made other changes, including other new characters (the brace and vertical bar characters), renaming some control characters (SOM became start of header (SOH)) and moving or removing others (RU

5088-429: The company retooled itself as a true Internet service provider, making its main offering Internet access branded as Prodigy Internet. This new service featured personalized web content, news alerts to pagers , and Java chat. At the same time, Prodigy deemphasized its antiquated proprietary interface and editorial content, which were relabeled as Prodigy Classic. Prodigy Classic was discontinued on October 1, 1999 because

5194-493: The concept of "carriage return" was meaningless. IBM's PC DOS (also marketed as MS-DOS by Microsoft) inherited the convention by virtue of being loosely based on CP/M, and Windows in turn inherited it from MS-DOS. Requiring two characters to mark the end of a line introduces unnecessary complexity and ambiguity as to how to interpret each character when encountered by itself. To simplify matters, plain text data streams, including files, on Multics used line feed (LF) alone as

5300-939: The connection to its national data center in Yorktown. Under the guidance of Henry Heilbrunn, Prodigy developed a fully staffed 24/7 newsroom with editors, writers and graphic artists intent on building the world's first true online medium. The initial result was that Prodigy pioneered the concept of an online content portal —a single site offering news, weather, sports, communication with other members and shopping for goods and services such as groceries, general merchandise, brokerage services and airline reservations. The service provided several lifestyle features, including popular syndicated columnists, Zagat restaurant surveys, Consumer Reports articles and test reports, games for children and adults, in-depth original features called "Timely Topics", bulletin boards moderated by subject matter experts, movie reviews and email. Working with Heilbrunn in

5406-527: The convention was so well established that backward compatibility necessitated continuing to follow it. When Gary Kildall created CP/M , he was inspired by some of the command line interface conventions used in DEC's RT-11 operating system. Until the introduction of PC DOS in 1981, IBM had no influence in this because their 1970s operating systems used EBCDIC encoding instead of ASCII, and they were oriented toward punch-card input and line printer output on which

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5512-476: The design of character sets used by modern computers, including Unicode which has over a million code points, but the first 128 of these are the same as ASCII. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) prefers the name US-ASCII for this character encoding. ASCII is one of the IEEE milestones . ASCII was developed in part from telegraph code . Its first commercial use was in the Teletype Model 33 and

5618-597: The display of colors and graphics supporting electronic advertising, publishing and commerce. The initial emphasis was on DOS and later Microsoft Windows . After that, users could use the Apple Macintosh , but some Prodigy screens were not properly configured to the Mac standard, resulting in wasted space or partial graphics. Prodigy's initial business model relied more on advertising and online shopping for cash flow than on monthly subscriptions. Subscribers were charged

5724-484: 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. AT&T stopped serving Prodigy-created webpages in 2011, severing yet another tie with the brand. As of March 6, 2024, www.prodigy.net redirects to https://currently.att.yahoo.com . In Mexico, Prodigy Internet is the main ISP with an estimated 92% of market share. It

5830-663: The earlier five-bit ITA2 , which was also used by the competing Telex teleprinter system. Bob Bemer introduced features such as the escape sequence . His British colleague Hugh McGregor Ross helped to popularize this work – according to Bemer, "so much so that the code that was to become ASCII was first called the Bemer–Ross Code in Europe". Because of his extensive work on ASCII, Bemer has been called "the father of ASCII". On March 11, 1968, US President Lyndon B. Johnson mandated that all computers purchased by

5936-576: The earlier teleprinter encoding systems. Like other character encodings , ASCII specifies a correspondence between digital bit patterns and character symbols (i.e. graphemes and control characters ). This allows digital devices to communicate with each other and to process, store, and communicate character-oriented information such as written language. Before ASCII was developed, the encodings in use included 26 alphabetic characters, 10 numerical digits , and from 11 to 25 special graphic symbols. To include all these, and control characters compatible with

6042-621: The earliest multi-player online games (or MMOG ), in 1985. The service was run by General Electric Information Services (GEIS, now GXS ) based in Rockville , Maryland . GEIS served a diverse set of large-scale, international, commercial network-based custom application needs, including banking, electronic data interchange and e-mail services to companies worldwide, but was able to run GEnie on their many GE Mark III time-sharing mainframe computers that otherwise would have been underutilized after normal U.S. business hours. This orientation

6148-695: The early stages of Prodigy's design, Bob Bedard pioneered the business model for electronic commerce. Prodigy was the service that launched ESPN 's online presence. Prodigy quickly implemented application standard code modules loaded from diskette. These modules relied upon real-time tokenized data from Prodigy database servers to drive core Prodigy service functionality on local user PCs. This client-server design worked well; by staging application-specific and reusable common code modules on Prodigy end-user diskettes, millisecond "click-to-available-cursor" response times were achieved that were otherwise unachievable in 1986 over slow 1,200-to-2,400 bit/s modems. The service

6254-410: The email service to act as private bulletin boards. This was accomplished by sending emails to intentionally invalid addresses containing the name of the intended recipients. The service would return the emails, which were not billed, and users of the shared account would find the returned messages there. Replies were sent by entering the name of the first sender as the addressee, which would again trigger

6360-548: The end-of-transmission character ( EOT ), also known as control-D, to indicate the end of a data stream. In the C programming language , and in Unix conventions, the null character is used to terminate text strings ; such null-terminated strings can be known in abbreviation as ASCIZ or ASCIIZ, where here Z stands for "zero". Other representations might be used by specialist equipment, for example ISO 2047 graphics or hexadecimal numbers. Codes 20 hex to 7E hex , known as

6466-627: The first 32 code points (numbers 0–31 decimal) and the last one (number 127 decimal) for control characters . These are codes intended to control peripheral devices (such as printers ), or to provide meta-information about data streams, such as those stored on magnetic tape. Despite their name, these code points do not represent printable characters (i.e. they are not characters at all, but signals). For debugging purposes, "placeholder" symbols (such as those given in ISO 2047 and its predecessors) are assigned to them. For example, character 0x0A represents

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6572-430: The home of excellent online text games, similar to the "doorway" games on bulletin board systems but often massively multiplayer . Also, there were graphical games using then-state-of-the-art non-textured 3D graphics on PCs with VGA displays. Top titles included: Other major titles included: A RoundTable on GEnie was a discussion area containing a message board (" BBS "), a chatroom ("RealTime Conference" or RTC) and

6678-448: The keytop for the O key also showed a left-arrow symbol (from ASCII-1963, which had this character instead of underscore ), a noncompliant use of code 15 (control-O, shift in) interpreted as "delete previous character" was also adopted by many early timesharing systems but eventually became neglected. When a Teletype 33 ASR equipped with the automatic paper tape reader received a control-S (XOFF, an abbreviation for transmit off), it caused

6784-736: The local conventions and the NVT. The File Transfer Protocol adopted the Telnet protocol, including use of the Network Virtual Terminal, for use when transmitting commands and transferring data in the default ASCII mode. This adds complexity to implementations of those protocols, and to other network protocols, such as those used for E-mail and the World Wide Web, on systems not using the NVT's CR-LF line-ending convention. The PDP-6 monitor, and its PDP-10 successor TOPS-10, used control-Z (SUB) as an end-of-file indication for input from

6890-480: The newcomers who came to GEnie from Prodigy and AOL adjust; these were the equivalent of modern-day email programs and newsreaders, incorporating a more user-friendly interface which automated message and mail downloading and posting. In addition, GEnie took its time developing an Internet e-mail gateway, which opened on July 1, 1993. GE sold GEnie in 1996 to Yovelle, which was later taken over by IDT Corp. IDT attempted to transition GEnie (now branded "Genie" without

6996-1191: The official online forum of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), which led a number of science fiction writers to join GEnie. Besides those already mentioned, they included Dafydd ab Hugh , John Barnes , Keith DeCandido , Steven Brust , Michael A. Burstein , Debra Doyle , Neil Gaiman , Joe Haldeman , Katharine Kerr , Michael Kube-McDowell , Paul Levinson , George R.R. Martin , Rich Normandie, Raven Oak , Mike Resnick , Robert J. Sawyer , J. Neil Schulman , Josepha Sherman , Susan Shwartz , Martha Soukup , Michael Swanwick , Judith Tarr , Harry Turtledove , Lawrence Watt-Evans , Leslie What , and Jane Yolen . Occasional but less frequent visitors included K. W. Jeter and Ken Grimwood . Science fiction editors Gardner Dozois , Scott Edelman , Peter Heck , Tappan King , Beth Meacham , Patrick Nielsen Hayden , Teresa Nielsen Hayden , Sheila Finch and Dean Wesley Smith were also frequent participants. ASCII ASCII ( / ˈ æ s k iː / ASS -kee ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange ,

7102-604: The original creator of GEnie, formed a group of investors to buy the Delphi online service from News Corp , where he led the transition of the service from text-only to the Web (and from a pay-per-hour to an advertising-supported revenue model). Many well-known personalities were early adopters of the online medium, and were a prominent presence on GEnie, either active in one of its RoundTables, or frequent public participants in GEnie's CB Chat. The Science Fiction RoundTable (SFRT) became

7208-468: The other services would rise dramatically. By the final year, insiders reported fewer than 10,000 total users. On December 4, 1999, it was announced that GEnie would close for good on December 27 due to the year 2000 problem . Remaining users gathered in chat areas of the few RoundTables remaining to say goodbye. But GEnie did not close for four more days, and a dwindling number watched at the close of each day. The RoundTables and all areas of GEnie, except

7314-452: The previous character in canonical input processing (where a very simple line editor is available); this could be set to BS or DEL, but not both, resulting in recurring situations of ambiguity where users had to decide depending on what terminal they were using ( shells that allow line editing, such as ksh , bash , and zsh , understand both). The assumption that no key sent a BS character allowed Ctrl+H to be used for other purposes, such as

7420-515: The previous section. Code 7F hex corresponds to the non-printable "delete" (DEL) control character and is therefore omitted from this chart; it is covered in the previous section's chart. Earlier versions of ASCII used the up arrow instead of the caret (5E hex ) and the left arrow instead of the underscore (5F hex ). ASCII was first used commercially during 1963 as a seven-bit teleprinter code for American Telephone & Telegraph 's TWX (TeletypeWriter eXchange) network. TWX originally used

7526-413: The printable characters, represent letters, digits, punctuation marks , and a few miscellaneous symbols. There are 95 printable characters in total. Code 20 hex , the "space" character, denotes the space between words, as produced by the space bar of a keyboard. Since the space character is considered an invisible graphic (rather than a control character) it is listed in the table below instead of in

7632-447: The product's poor graphics that resulted from the limitations of current technology. Using the early NAPLPS graphic standard, rendering realistic images of products was impossible, presenting great difficulty for online merchants to market products. Despite these challenges, Prodigy was primarily responsible for helping merchants such as PC Flowers become some of the earliest e-commerce success stories. However, revenue from advertising

7738-444: The proposed Bell code and ASCII were both ordered for more convenient sorting (i.e., alphabetization) of lists and added features for devices other than teleprinters. The use of ASCII format for Network Interchange was described in 1969. That document was formally elevated to an Internet Standard in 2015. Originally based on the (modern) English alphabet , ASCII encodes 128 specified characters into seven-bit integers as shown by

7844-668: The retention value was lost. Many members found more affordable ways to access the online content and services they were used to. In 1999 the company, now led by a cadre of ex-MCI executives to turn the brand around, became Prodigy Internet, marketing a full range of services, applications, and content, including dial-up and DSL for consumers and small businesses, instant messaging, e-mail, and communities. 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

7950-522: The same reason, many special signs commonly used as separators were placed before digits. The committee decided it was important to support uppercase 64-character alphabets , and chose to pattern ASCII so it could be reduced easily to a usable 64-character set of graphic codes, as was done in the DEC SIXBIT code (1963). Lowercase letters were therefore not interleaved with uppercase . To keep options available for lowercase letters and other graphics,

8056-494: The second stick, positions 1–5, corresponding to the digits 1–5 in the adjacent stick. The parentheses could not correspond to 9 and 0 , however, because the place corresponding to 0 was taken by the space character. This was accommodated by removing _ (underscore) from 6 and shifting the remaining characters, which corresponded to many European typewriters that placed the parentheses with 8 and 9 . This discrepancy from typewriters led to bit-paired keyboards , notably

8162-629: The service available through the SprintNet time-sharing network, which had its own dial-up points of presence; an Internet-to-SprintNet gateway operated by Merit Network also made the text-based parts of the service available through telnet .) The initial price for connection, at both 300 bits per second and the then-high-speed 1,200 bits per second, was $ 5–6 per hour during "non-prime-time" hours (evenings and weekends) and $ 36 an hour (to discourage daytime use) otherwise, later adjusted to $ 6 per hour and $ 18 per hour, respectively. A speed of 2,400 bit/s

8268-758: The service since its founding. Prodigy continued to operate as it had previously, while Telmex provided Internet access under the Prodigy brand in Mexico and other parts of Latin America , with some services provided by Prodigy Communications in the US. Prodigy went public in 1999, trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol PRGY. Later that year, Prodigy entered a strategic partnership with SBC Communications by which Prodigy would provide Internet services and SBC would provide exclusive sales opportunities and network, particularly DSL , facilities. The strategic partnership also gave SBC

8374-492: The service). By May 1986, GEnie claimed to have 12,000 subscribers, up from 3,000 in February. Although it for years was the second-largest service provider after CompuServe, GEnie failed to keep up when Prodigy and America Online produced graphics-based online services that drew the masses. Programs such as Aladdin, which had been developed earlier by an independent developer and eventually supported by GEnie, helped many of

8480-458: The service, similar to AOL's. Access to Usenet newsgroups was made available and Prodigy's first web presence, Astranet, was released shortly afterward. Astranet was to be a web-based news and information service supported partly by advertising. However, the site was considered experimental and incomplete. Another innovation was Skimmer, a market trial ISP service that became the base for Prodigy Internet. In 1996, with Gregory C. Carr as chair,

8586-538: The simple line characters \ | (in addition to common / ). The @ symbol was not used in continental Europe and the committee expected it would be replaced by an accented À in the French variation, so the @ was placed in position 40 hex , right before the letter A. The control codes felt essential for data transmission were the start of message (SOM), end of address (EOA), end of message (EOM), end of transmission (EOT), "who are you?" (WRU), "are you?" (RU),

8692-402: The special and numeric codes were arranged before the letters, and the letter A was placed in position 41 hex to match the draft of the corresponding British standard. The digits 0–9 are prefixed with 011, but the remaining 4 bits correspond to their respective values in binary, making conversion with binary-coded decimal straightforward (for example, 5 in encoded to 011 0101 , where 5

8798-425: The standard is unclear about the meaning of "delete". Probably the most influential single device affecting the interpretation of these characters was the Teletype Model 33 ASR, which was a printing terminal with an available paper tape reader/punch option. Paper tape was a very popular medium for long-term program storage until the 1980s, less costly and in some ways less fragile than magnetic tape. In particular,

8904-440: The structure or appearance of text within a document. Other schemes, such as markup languages , address page and document layout and formatting. The original ASCII standard used only short descriptive phrases for each control character. The ambiguity this caused was sometimes intentional, for example where a character would be used slightly differently on a terminal link than on a data stream , and sometimes accidental, for example

9010-441: The tape reader to stop; receiving control-Q (XON, transmit on) caused the tape reader to resume. This so-called flow control technique became adopted by several early computer operating systems as a "handshaking" signal warning a sender to stop transmission because of impending buffer overflow ; it persists to this day in many systems as a manual output control technique. On some systems, control-S retains its meaning, but control-Q

9116-600: The time could record eight bits in one position, it also allowed for a parity bit for error checking if desired. Eight-bit machines (with octets as the native data type) that did not use parity checking typically set the eighth bit to 0. The code itself was patterned so that most control codes were together and all graphic codes were together, for ease of identification. The first two so-called ASCII sticks (32 positions) were reserved for control characters. The "space" character had to come before graphics to make sorting easier, so it became position 20 hex ; for

9222-403: The time. So it could only have been a positive for the Prodigy brand. As the company shifted from its focus on its exclusive "Prodigy Classic" content and started transitioning to "Prodigy Internet" as an ISP in the late 1990s, Prodigy found itself competing with many other lower-priced ISPs, and the price didn't support the value of the Prodigy Internet exclusive content available for members. In

9328-401: The time. The contractors received royalties on time spent in their forums. In the most popular forums, this revenue stream was often substantial enough to hire one or two part-time or full-time staffers. Many RoundTables also had a number of unpaid assistants, working for a "free flag" (which granted them free access to that RoundTable) or an "internal account" (which granted free access to all of

9434-447: The typebars that strike the ribbon remain stationary. The entire carriage had to be pushed (returned) to the right in order to position the paper for the next line. DEC operating systems ( OS/8 , RT-11 , RSX-11 , RSTS , TOPS-10 , etc.) used both characters to mark the end of a line so that the console device (originally Teletype machines) would work. By the time so-called "glass TTYs" (later called CRTs or "dumb terminals") came along,

9540-497: Was also available at a premium. Later, GEnie developed the Star*Services package, soon renamed Genie*Basic after Prodigy threatened a trademark lawsuit over the use of the word "Star". It offered a set of "unlimited use" features for $ 4.95 per month. Other services cost extra, mirroring the tiered service model popular at the time. GEnie's forums were called RoundTables (RTs), and each, as well as other internal services, had

9646-400: 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 before the World Wide Web became widely used, but

9752-562: Was developed under the auspices of a committee of the American Standards Association (ASA), called the X3 committee, by its X3.2 (later X3L2) subcommittee, and later by that subcommittee's X3.2.4 working group (now INCITS ). The ASA later became the United States of America Standards Institute (USASI) and ultimately became the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). With the other special characters and control codes filled in, ASCII

9858-403: Was exceeded, the subscriber would incur additional charges based on usage time. A blue indicator in the bottom-right corner of the screen indicated the subscriber's section. Prodigy's shopping applications initially underperformed relative to expectations. This was attributed to the company's misperception that online shoppers would pay a premium rather than expect discounts for merchandise and to

9964-672: 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

10070-647: Was in White Plains Plaza in White Plains, New York . Prodigy announced plans to renew its lease in August 1992, occupying all 340,000 square feet (32,000 m ) of space in the building. In 1992, the facility had 1,000 employees. In 2000, the company announced that it would move its headquarters to Austin, Texas in order to work more closely with SBC Communications . During that year, Prodigy leased 112,000 square feet (10,400 m ) of space in

10176-640: Was initially developed primarily to aid shopping. However, it later found much greater usage as a means of general communication between users. The popularity of Prodigy's message boards caused users to remain connected to the service far longer than had been projected. This resulted in escalating expenses that adversely affected the service's cash flow and profitability. To control costs and raise revenue, in January 1991, Prodigy modified its basic subscriber plans by allowing only 30 free email messages each month, while charging 25 cents for each additional email message,

10282-400: Was largely unable to capitalize on these first-mover advantages. Decades later, IBM , which now owns some of the original Prodigy patents, continues to sell licenses for basic ecommerce concepts. 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. Prodigy's legacy architecture

10388-482: Was limited. By 1993, Prodigy was developing a network architecture now known as a content delivery network in which the network caches its most frequently accessed content as close as possible to the users. The company sold private versions of it within customers' private corporate networks. Two of Prodigy's most popular services were its message boards and email. Because Prodigy's business model depended on rapidly growing advertising and online shopping revenue, email

10494-531: Was not an actual Internet service provider , programs that needed an Internet connection, such as Internet Explorer and the Quake multiplayer game, could not be used with the service. Prodigy developed its own web browser, but it compared poorly to other mainstream browsers in terms of features. In 1995/1996, Prodigy hired Ed Bennett and Will Lansing. From 1995 through 1996, Prodigy unveiled several Internet-related products. It debuted its real-time chat area within

10600-467: 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 objects largely pulled from the network when needed. At a time when distributed objects were handled by RPC equivalents, Prodigy pioneered the concept of returning interpretable, platform-independent objects to

10706-404: Was part of GEnie's downfall. Although it became very popular and a national force in the on-line marketplace, GEnie was not allowed to grow. GEIS executives steadfastly refused to view the service as anything but "fill in" load and would not expand the network by a single phone line, let alone expand mainframe capacity, to accommodate GEnie's growing user base. (Later, however, GE did consent to make

10812-535: Was presented using a graphical user interface . The Data Object Architecture wrapped vector and incremental point graphics, encoded as per NAPLPS , along with interpretative programs written in the proprietary languages TBOL (Trintex Basic Object Language) and PAL (Prodigy Application Language). NAPLPS grew out of the Canadian Telidon project, becoming an international standard in 1983 after some extensions were added by AT&T Corporation . NAPLPS enabled

10918-695: Was published as ASA X3.4-1963, leaving 28 code positions without any assigned meaning, reserved for future standardization, and one unassigned control code. There was some debate at the time whether there should be more control characters rather than the lowercase alphabet. The indecision did not last long: during May 1963 the CCITT Working Party on the New Telegraph Alphabet proposed to assign lowercase characters to sticks 6 and 7, and International Organization for Standardization TC 97 SC 2 voted during October to incorporate

11024-450: Was removed). ASCII was subsequently updated as USAS X3.4-1967, then USAS X3.4-1968, ANSI X3.4-1977, and finally, ANSI X3.4-1986. In the X3.15 standard, the X3 committee also addressed how ASCII should be transmitted ( least significant bit first) and recorded on perforated tape. They proposed a 9-track standard for magnetic tape and attempted to deal with some punched card formats. The X3.2 subcommittee designed ASCII based on

11130-622: 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,

11236-594: Was the largest. In 2001, it was acquired by SBC Communications , which in 2005 became the present iteration of AT&T . The Mexican branch of Prodigy, however, was acquired by Telmex . 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

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