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Goliath At Bay

But the @Home people were perplexed. How could they use Windows NT, an alien system on the Internet, unfamiliar to their employees or to the Internet service-provider personnel who would work the @Home headends and other nodes? Microsoft was behaving in the Internet environment as if the company were still safe in the imperial realms of Windows desktops.

So @Home, which promises to be the most important force in the next phase of Internet evolution, and Medin, the intellectual firebrand at the heart of @Home, seem unlikely to embrace Microsoft’s offerings.

Milo's Dark Shadow Over Microsoft
As for TCI, its enthusiasm was dented a bit by the collapse of the MSN project, in which Malone invested $125 million. But TCI has recouped its loss. Jim Clark was persuaded to offer TCI a small share of the Netscape IPO. After the initial public offering and the subsequent boom in Netscape shares, TCI’s holding was worth $125 million, leaving TCI quite comfortable with its new allies in Mountain View.

A deeper look at Medin’s plans casts darker shadows in the path of Microsoft. Asked about the notion of an Internet computer being free of Windows and other Microsoft levies, Gates stops rocking on his chair and gets to his feet. He turns and paces urgently back and forth across his office. He gesticulates, summons the history of past challenges, refers repeatedly to dumb terminals and other unappetizing machines, and hurls forth rhetorical questions: “Do you want to go onto the Internet when you are doing word processing, do you want to go on the Internet when you are using PowerPoint or Excel?” In other words, do you want to forgo all the wonderful new OLE interactions among Microsoft programs and all the new Microsoft hot links and other forthcoming tools when you go on the Net?

Under the pressure of Gates’s energy and conviction and hypotheticals, I answer, “Of course not.” But the real answer is, “Sure, if in exchange I can have a computer that outperforms a current Wintel machine on the Net and contains linking capabilities comparable to OLE for one-third the price.”

Gates himself sketched out the answer in his famous Internet Tidal Wave memo, issued in May to galvanize his company in the face of the new threat. He pointed out that not only could he access far more information on the Internet, he could also find, search and browse it more readily on the Net than on a LAN or, for that matter, he might have pointed out, Gates’s own hard drive or CD-ROM.

The error of all the critics of the $500 teleputer is their assumption that it will be inferior to current PCs. It will be, they claim, a PC minus a fast CPU, short a high-resolution monitor, without a fast memory or large drive.

This assumption misses the compounding impact of microcosm and telecosm. The advance of chip technology, through Moore’s Law, together with the advance of network bandwidth, will endow a machine not inferior but hugely more powerful, than the most supercharged Pentium workstation on a local-area network linked to the Internet at ISDN speeds.

The Law of the Microcosm ordains that one-chip systems will be better, not worse, than intersecting boards strewn with devices linked by wires and buses. As Wilf Corrigan, chief of LSI Logic, observes, “From calculators to cellular phones, every time a system has moved onto a single chip, it has wreaked havoc with the existing industry.”

IN PREPARING THE WAY for one-chip teleputers, Medin concedes that the current Internet will not support broadband services. “You link a broadband modem to the existing Internet and what you get is an impedance mismatch”—a bunch of fire hoses attached to a network of garden hoses. In order to accommodate the fire hoses of @Home, Medin will have to enlarge the bandwidth of the Net, from the humblest service provider to the NAPs at the top of the network hierarchy, where the leading service providers join to “peer and exchange” data.

Leasing capacity from the telephone companies, @Home will create a new broadband network linking to the existing NAPs at MAE East in Tyson’s Corner, Va., at the Sprint NAP in Pennsauken, N.J., and at MAE West in Mountain View. This will expand the capacity of the so-called Internet backbone (in fact, an ever-shifting array of virtual vertebrae), which currently works with maximum pipes running at 45 megabits per second. Over the next two years, Medin plans to upgrade his backbone to 622 megabits a second.

Most important and revolutionary, though, are Medin’s plans for the local loops and service providers of the Net. Contrary to the claims of many critics that the Internet PC implies a return to the now-discredited model of the mainframe and dumb terminals, @Home resolutely distributes intelligence and memory through the network.

At the heart of the @Home system is ingenious hierarchical memory management and caching to conceal the mazes of slow routers, sluggish switches and narrowband wires that lurk treacherously among the higher reaches of the Internet. Indeed, when Doerr finally got through to Medin and, with Will Hearst, first proposed cable modems to him, he said they wouldn’t work. There would be “impedance mismatches” with the hardware and software in the rest of the network.

“This kind of blew the air out of their tires,” says Medin. “But then I told them how the system could work.”

“You have to think of it as a distributed computer system. In such systems, every processor cannot access memory at once. You build caches and shared-memory protocols and you mirror and replicate a lot of the data so that it’s always available locally. That’s what you’re going to have to do on the Internet.”

In other words, the Internet is a computer on a planet. Like a computer on a chip, its raw bandwidth cannot handle the necessary throughput. Thus its communications depend on ingenious hierarchical memory management, with registers, buffers, latches, caches and direct memory access controllers.

Studies of Internet use show that some 80% of the traffic is still local. If a particular Web page is popular in a particular locality, you have to have that page in the hard drive or even in RAM on a local server. You have to use the multicast capabilities of cable to broadcast popular information to all addresses. Above all, you have to make the system scalable. You have to phase in bandwidth, moving fiber links and nodes deeper into neighborhoods as demand rises. All this is perfectly possible technically, Medin assured Doerr.

“After I was through, they decided they had to hire me.

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