Recently I've been thinking about how Prodigy used to have banner ads at the bottom of most pages. This was actually INCREDIBLY futuristic for the time. The web was just barely a thing. Most people would still have been using Prodigy's client for MS-DOS at the time. The only reason it even looks as good as it does in the screenshot above is because they were using clever vector graphics techniques to deliver as little information over dialup as possible -- the same techniques that made early Sierra games possible.

These days, of course, it is both disgusting and a given that there is advertising plastered over everything. (Present company excluded, of course.) In the here and now, I want nothing to do with ads. But in the past? Honestly, I didn't mind them. Part of it was that I was too young to know better, but also there was an enormous novelty factor. Being online was such an amazing thing that even an advertisement had entertainment value. Plus it's not like there was anywhere else for the ad to take you but somewhere else on Prodigy, so either way, you were still Being Online, which is what you wanted to do when you sat down at the computer anyway. The best advertising, of course, was the filler advertising that let you know about other parts of Prodigy that you possibly didn't already know existed.

There's no moral here, but now I kind of want to make a recreation of Prodigy's vector graphics interface in cohost using CSS and SVG. The way pages loaded in layer by layer was mesmerizing. And of course, if I did, it'd need to have fake banner ads. It just wouldn't look the right size otherwise.