The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : Prodigy Lifts Lead Feet, Plods Into the Future

Once upon a time you shopped at Sears, you used an IBM computer and, if you were interested in an on-line service, you dialed Prodigy.

Prodigy, you’ll recall, is owned by these two stumbling stalwarts. And nowadays, to many users of on-line services, it is the perfect cyberspace expression of its corporate parents: clunky, lead-footed and massive, yesterday’s leader eclipsed by glossier newcomers. Well, like Sears and IBM, Prodigy is hardly on the ropes. It still has more than 2 million users and is offering some interesting new features, including access to Internet newsgroups, a built-in World Wide Web browser and a new offering called Homework Helper that is set to debut today.

Prodigy will at last roll out 14,400 bps access nationwide in the weeks ahead (it’s already available in Los Angeles; jump HIGH SPEED ACCESS). It also finally plans, sometime this year, to let one choose one’s user name, so I can be akst@prodigy.com, instead of LPXU92A.

But the biggest change will come this spring, the company says, when it will come out with a redesigned interface. The project intends to make Prodigy act like a regular Windows (and later, Macintosh) program. Better yet, the interface will be based on Hypertext Mark-up Language, or HTML, allowing links directly to sites on the World Wide Web. So is Prodigy back? Well, maybe. I found Homework Helper disappointing, but the Web browser is surprisingly good. I’ll reserve judgment on the interface until a more finished version is available. But before we plunge into all that, a pause for full disclosure: Times Mirror Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times, operates its TimesLink on-line service in partnership with Prodigy, and I’m a shareholder of both Times Mirror and IBM.

For all those reasons, I wish I had something better to say about Homework Helper. The concept is exciting, after all: Ask a question in plain English, and Homework Helper will search its databanks for the answer. The information sources include an array of reference books and periodicals, including the Los Angeles Times.

Eager to test it, I decided to start with something basic: “Why is grass green?” Homework Helper has a nice Windows interface, and after just 15 seconds turned up 200 entries, most of them with high scores on what might be called its likelihood scale, meaning one of these ought to do it. The very first item, though, was the “jewelry and gems” entry from Compton’s encyclopedia, which simply happened to mention grass and green next to one another in a description.

I went back to the list, which featured a remarkable array of irrelevant material from Monarch Notes, National Public Radio, Francis Bacon’s essays, “The Song of Roland,” Gannett Newspapers, the New Republic, the National Review, Golf Magazine, the Economist and more. My favorite was an entry from Magill’s Survey of Cinema on “The Grass Is Greener,” with Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum. Did you know the music was by Noel Coward? Unfortunately, I still have no idea why grass is green. How about “What is the Internet?” Homework Helper turned up nothing. “What is the history of Brooklyn?” yielded several entries on the cartoonist Ben Katchor, a recent photograph of the Brooklyn Bridge and my favorite for the “why computers can’t replace people” prize, a story from the Progressive featuring Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberto Menchu. It referred to indigenous peoples “with impressive histories” and mentioned Brooklyn Rivera, a Miskito Contra leader from Nicaragua. My first success came with “Who was George Bernard Shaw?” Among the 196 responses, I found the Compton’s entry, which gave a reasonable answer. But “What is a sonnet?” yielded only frustration, although some actual sonnets were given. Bear in mind that every time I wanted to look at an entry turned up by a search, I had to wait perhaps 20 seconds for it to download, since Homework Helper seems determined to push the entire story through my phone line instead of letting me see the top first.

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I’d have been even more unhappy if I’d been paying the usual Homework Helper rate: $9.95 a month for 2 hours and $2.95 for each additional hour, or without a subscription for $6 an hour, on top of Prodigy’s usual charges. Prodigy’s Web browser, on the other hand, is quite good, and is already so successful that Prodigy says it is now the world’s largest Web access provider. The World Wide Web is the Internet’s way of presenting information--words, pictures, even sounds--in the form of hypertext, allowing you to jump from place to place along links between information. To access the World Wide Web, you need a Web browser, but most dial-up users can only use a text-based browser that is very far from cool.

That is rapidly changing, though, and Prodigy has leaped to the forefront of commercial on-line services by offering a browser of its own. (America Online and CompuServe say they are coming out with browsers soon.) At a relatively slow 9600 bps, Prodigy’s Web browser verges on the amazing. It’s still slow, but unlike Homework Helper, it’s smart. It knows to get the text first, for example, and fill in the images, which take much longer to come over, as you’re reading. Discover that you’re not interested in a given Web page and you can blow the whole thing off without all that waiting.

Prodigy is also making clever use of its distributed computing network to mirror the most popular Web sites on its own machines, making access that much faster. On the other hand, at $2.95 an hour this is an expensive way to access the Web. Competition seems likely to bring these prices down, though, so stay tuned.