Prodigy was one of the OGs of online services—launched in 1988, it gave regular people a way to connect to the internet before the web even took off. Jointly owned by IBM and Sears (yep, wild combo), it let users send emails, browse news, shop, and hit up message boards—all in a pre-browser, menu-driven interface that felt futuristic at the time. They dropped version updates throughout the early ‘90s to clean up the clunky UI and add more interactive content, but by the mid-90s, the web exploded and Prodigy couldn’t keep up. They tried pivoting with Prodigy Internet in ’95, ditching the old platform and going full web browser—but by then, AOL and others had already eaten their lunch. Still, if you ever watched your screen load painfully slow pixel by pixel while waiting on a Prodigy connection, you were living the future back then.