Time for me to chime in with my four cents' worth. (Inflation, you know.)

My comments are not directed at Jim, and I don't purport to speak for him or for anyone else. These are my own comments and opinions, nothing more or less.

Like Jim, I hope Prodigy stays alive, and I work to make that happen. It has many features (including having given us chippers a chat room of our own) unavailable anywhere else, and an interface which, while a bit old and clunky, has tremendous advantages over other dedicated services and the Internet.

I also admit to some of what one person who posted here referred to as a bit of nostalgia. Prodigy was the first electronic service to go national, back before there WAS an Internet accessible to virtually everyone with a modem. There was a time when I was the only chip collector using a computer regularly to talk (on Prodigy bulletin boards) with other chip collectors. I can recall organizing chippers on Prodigy's Travel BB, then on Hobbies, then Games, and finally, our home for the last several years, the Collecting 1 bulletin board.

I take some pride in having recruited many chip collectors for CC&GTCC through Prodigy. Many of them visit Greg's board regularly.

The last time I did a "roll call" of chip collectors on Prodigy, there were almost 70 active members who replied, and Prodigy is the only dedicated online service where chip collectors can and do regularly post and chat. AOL has no such group or area for people to gather; CompuServe's group has disbanded, and there is no longer a chip collecting area in the Collecting Forum there.

I subscribe to CompuServe and AOL (although I have no reason to go to AOL and may well drop the subscription), and find it difficult to believe that $20 a month is too much for most chippers to handle. It seems that some people expect to find everything in one service, or through one Internet service provider. It doesn't work that way, any more than everything you could possibly want to see on television is on one channel.

A year ago the word was that Prodigy was headed for the cybergraveyard. It wasn't true then, and it's going strong now. And it is, because there are advantages to the service that are unavailable elsewhere.

I have been conducting weekly auctions of casino collectibles on Prodigy for quite a few years now. They're a lot of work. I do it to promote Prodigy among chip collectors, to provide a place for chippers to gather to talk live, real-time about the hobby, and to help my fellow collectors at no cost to them. Prodigy is the only viable way to do so.

Especially given that Prodigy is actually two services for the price of one: the "classic" service which includes the chipping bulletin board as well as the chipping chat room; and an excellent Internet service provider in Prodigy Internet, the monthly fee is really quite reasonable.

If anyone would like to try it - free - e-mail me and I will have Prodigy software with free trial hours sent out to you.

-=Michael the Chipper=-