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. You could mostly find me on the ” Beverly Hills, 90210 ” and ” The Young and the Restless ” threads, and for a retro fix, the one that focused on ” The Brady Bunch.
