Getting ordinary people involved in a service of which IBM Corp is the co-owner was always going throw up a steady stream of silly conspiracy stories, and the Prodigy Systems Co viewdata joint venture has confirmed the fact in spades: latest scare story arises from the fact that the Prodigy software commandeers a big block of disk space when it is invoked, and by a quirk of MS-DOS, if the program doesn’t use up all of that space, text and data from other files can get written into the space – and remains accessible by the Prodigy software – and in theory the Prodigy operators because they can access any computer while it is on line to the system, so that the user software can be replaced with the latest release when it has been changed until the disk space is needed by Prodigy; according to the Wall Street Journal, a tax consultant found confidential details on clients, others have found bits of programs they were writing, and scare-mongers worry that the folks at Prodigy will start rummaging through their files; the answer is clearly that Prodigy subscribers should dedicate the cheapest machine they can find to the system and not do any sensitive work on it, so the conspiracy theorists reckon the quirk is a deliberate ploy by IBM to enable it to push the PS/1 for that purpose.
