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Magic Oddball writes:

The Atlantic recently published an interesting in-depth article on the history of the Prodigy network, its cultural impact, and efforts to restore files by reverse-engineering the software in hope of showing people what it was like.

[When Prodigy Classic was discontinued], the written record of a massive, unique online culture, including millions of messages and tens of thousands of hand-drawn pieces of digital art, seemingly vanished into thin air. ... It was then shuffled around, forgotten, and perhaps overwritten by a series of indifferent corporate overlords.

Fifteen years later, a Prodigy enthusiast named Jim Carpenter has found an ingenious way to bring some of that data back from the dead. With a little bit of Python code and some old Prodigy software at hand, Carpenter, working alone, recently managed to partially reverse-engineer the Prodigy client and eke out some Prodigy content that was formerly thought to have been lost forever.

The ultimate goal is to re-create it online live, but for now the focus is going to be on building a screenshot directory. Since each member's install directory only has the pages that they visited, though, he needs as many of them as people can track down. The detailed project FAQ has (among many other things) instructions on what to do if you find a Prodigy directory. (The FAQ also says, for those wondering: "Jim's code is not ready for release yet, but he hopes to polish it up enough to put up on GitHub soon.")