Long before romance seekers started swiping right, a CNET writer met her spouse on a long-extinct online service that came in a box.
When I met my husband Rob online, Prince Charles and Princess Diana were still married. To each other. Gas cost about a dollar a gallon and Facebook’s wunderkind CEO Mark Zuckerberg was 5.
The author at the 2016 Minnesota State Fair with her husband, Rob, and daughter, Kelly.
It was 1991. I was just out of college in Minnesota, and my parents bought our first home computer. My mom was so pleased it was an authentic IBM, « not one of those clones, » and that it had a color display. She didn’t know or care, but the machine also could support a new online service called Prodigy, served up on a floppy disk that came in a little yellow box.
Prodigy, founded as Trintex back in 1984, was one of the first internet service providers, and by 1990, it swelled to around 465,000 subscribers. Online services , including AOL, CompuServe and GEnie , were like the kiddie pool of what would later become the deep ocean that’s the internet.
Membership was limited to those who loaded the service and paid $10 a month, so Prodigy members only interacted with other Prodigy members , and only read Prodigy news and content. It was like we’d all been transported to a weird auditorium where we could flit about and chat with strangers, but our room was sealed off from the one with AOL users.
I certainly wasn’t looking for love. Computer dating to me was just a cheesy punchline from an Archie comic book, and I already had a boyfriend. But I explored the nooks and crannies of the clunky service, reading out-of-town news stories, playing games, reading movie reviews and getting sports scores.
Like most every other Prodigy member, I loved two things about the service: the bulletin boards and a newfangled thing called e-mail. I spent the most time on a board called The Arts Club, reading and posting about TV, movies, books and music.
