Third time's the charm! This is my third Founders' Forum column. Thanks to those of you who have been reading this column since the first issue, and a hearty welcome to those of you who are joining on right now.

My name is Phil Goldman. I'm the Vice President of Engineering at WebTV Networks, and one of the founders of the company. This is my opportunity to share information about the WebTV Network and the Internet, and to give you a little bit of insight into what happens behind the scenes at WebTV Networks.

Last month I told you about the history of WebTV Networks. We went over the early days of the company, how we started working to achieve our vision of making the Internet accessible to real people, and how we were able to go online in September of last year.

Starting with this month's column, I'd like to tell you about how the WebTV Network operates. There's some exciting technology "under the hood" that makes our service so easy to use. If you're not interested in how it all works you can skip to the Odds and Ends section at the bottom.

There are two interesting components of the WebTV system: the Internet terminal and the WebTV Network. Both work together to bring you the quality you've come to expect from WebTV Networks. Actually, they are independent of each other, but are optimized to work together.

This month, I'm going to focus on the Internet terminal. At WebTV Networks we refer to it fondly as "the box". We use this term as shorthand, and I'll use it here. For those of you who are curious, it has nothing to do with the punishment in the movie "Cool Hand Luke." Mostly, we call it "the box" because it looks like a box! Much of the what I mention below is true for both the Sony and Philips/Magnavox Internet terminals.

The terminal has a few important components inside. The CPU is the brains of the operation; it contains the instructions that orchestrate how the box responds when you push buttons on the remote control, or when the terminal receives information over the phone line. The terminal uses an IDT 4640 chip as the CPU. It is a variant of the MIPS R4000 64-bit processor running at 112MHz. All of these numbers and acronyms mean that the box is very, very fast.

If the CPU is the brains of the box, then the Fido ASIC is its heart. ASIC is short for Application Specific Integrated Circuit. We designed this chip especially for the WebTV Internet terminal. It is the heart of the terminal because it is responsible for circulating information throughout the terminal. It ensures that all of the other parts have the information they need, much as the heart is responsible for circulating blood in your body.

Continuing with the corporeal analogy, the modem in the box is like its mouth and ears (if you can imagine combining those two body parts!). It is called a modem because it modulates information onto the phone line (the "mo" part of modem) to send it, and de-modulates the data that it hears on the phone line that was modulated by the other side (the "dem" in modem).

The modem we use in the WebTV Internet terminal is a Rockwell 33.6k modem, capable of sending 33,600 bits of information each second. Our modem is special, because we worked with Rockwell to include a feature known as LineShare^TM. LineShare allows us to give control back to you if you are trying to use the phone to make a phone call, or if you have call waiting. This makes the WebTV Internet terminal much easier to use for the majority of us who only have one phone line in our houses.

The terminal also contains some more circuitry that helps it connect effectively to the television. The audio system outputs CD-quality stereo sound through the red and white connectors on the back of your terminal. If your TV does not support stereo input you might want to consider hooking up the audio cables through your stereo system to hear the full effect. And, the WebTV video output system incorporates a special technology called TVLens^TM that allows us to deliver crisp, clean pictures of the Web directly to your TV. It's actually incredibly difficult to deliver the quality of picture that you see with the WebTV Network. For a comparison, turn on your video game machine or programmable VCR and take a look at the quality of the text on the screen. You'll see the amazing effects of TVLens.

Finally, the system's memory is like a person's memory. I bet you're not surprised by that. Earlier, I mentioned that the CPU is the brains of the terminal, but without memory, while it might be smart, it would also be an amnesiac.

There are three popular types of memory: programmable ROM, better known as "flash", ROM, and RAM. The WebTV Internet terminal uses all three. Flash memory stores the instructions that tell the CPU what to do, whether it's drawing a picture on the screen, playing a song, or responding to your input. One of the interesting features of flash memory is that the terminal can be put into a special mode so that it can be changed electronically, which means that we can actually change the very instructions that tell your terminal what to do.

This is how the WebTV Network's electronic upgrade feature is made possible. Periodically, you will be offered an upgrade to the system; instead of going immediately to a home page you start at a page that describes the new features that you'll receive. If you choose the Update Now button the terminal will reboot and start downloading a new version of the system. When the process is complete you have an entirely new version of the WebTV Network client than you had when you bought your terminal at the store! We're currently hard at work polishing off our next upgrade, and it should be available later this month.

ROM (Read Only Memory) is like flash memory, but it can never be changed once it is put into the terminal. However, it is very inexpensive compared with other types of memory. It is used to store all of the data that the terminal uses to provide the basic user experiences. For example, this includes the pictures of the road you see when connecting, the picture for the on-screen keyboard, and the swoosh sound your hear when the options panel comes up. It also includes a fair amount of the wiring for these pieces. For those of you who are interested, most of the WebTV Network's user interface (options panel, on-screen keyboard, etc.) is built out of HTML! No matter how many times the contents of the flash memory changes the ROM always stays the same.

Finally, RAM (Random Access Memory) can be changed at any time, so it is the most flexible of all of the three types of memory. However, if you ever lose power you will lose the contents of RAM, so we can't put any critical information in it. RAM is used mostly as a scratch pad for the box, and it includes a variety of pieces that contribute to the experience, from the buffers that hold what you see on the screen (two of them so you never see any rippling when the page changes) and hear for audio, to a place to store all of the images you see on the screen, so that we don't have to use the modem so often to get them from the serivce. And it's used just to remember odds and ends, like whether the option bar is currently up or down or how many letters you just typed into a field.

The WebTV Internet terminal is designed so that all of the important information that you might think is maintained in the terminal is also kept up in the service too. All of your mail, all of your setup information, your favorites, which phone numbers your box needs to call to connect, and any other information needed to let the Web know you're you is kept in the service. This means that even if you lose power for more than a few minutes, losing the contents of your RAM, the WebTV Network will be able to put you back together again. I'll explain more a bout how this works next month.

Odds and Ends
Last month I asked those of you who had signed up for the WebTV Network last September or October to drop me a line, so that we could see who had been the earliest to come on board. The results are in, and I want to thank all of you pioneers who responded.

The earliest confirmed date that I received was September 27, 1996. Congratulations, John! I also received a number of responses from people who joined us during the first and second weeks in October. You folks were close, but John beat you! This group included Robert, Bob, Brian, Colleen, Bernard, Stephen, Charles, Todd, Joseph, Lloyde, Maxine, Roy, Jerry, and Nanci.

I also received a number of responses from folks who weren't quite sure of the exact date, but had a rough idea. This included one response from someone who thought that they had signed on in August of last year. Nice try! The WebTV Network did not go online until September 18th. It is possible that this person was one of our early beta testers, but I hope that we were not asking these folks to pay for service then.

One of the surprising things I learned was that a lot of you have personalized your mail by including a signature line. This feature of WebTV mail allows you to create a few lines that are added to the bottom of any mail that you send. And some of you have done quite a bit with your signature lines. If you have a signature line that you're proud of, drop me a line and I'll pick out a few to report on in the next column.

Thank you for sending me mail on this and other topics. I try to read it and respond as quickly as possible. Thanks for being patient, and see you next month!