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Magic Oddball [soylentnews.org] writes:

The Atlantic recently published an interesting in-depth article [theatlantic.com] 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 [vintagecomputing.com] 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.")

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