The Great(er) Scroll of Dialing Wisdom

The "Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom", originally known as "The Great Scroll of Dialing Wisdom", was an internal WebTV Networks technical document covering the dial-up infrastructure of the WebTV/MSN TV service, and how WebTV Networks had tackled the issue of ensuring clients could dial into their ISPs without requiring manual input from the end user. The document detailed various systems, tools, and methods in place that made up the infrastructure, and explained why they were chosen. The first draft of this document was drafted as "The Great Scroll of Dialing Wisdom" on August 27, 1996, and the last known revision was published on June 25, 1999. The document's change of name to the "Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom" took place on October 30, 1997, when the document was completely rewritten. Some time around early 1998, WebTV employee Ray Hill converted the Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom into HTML and wrote a shorter version of it named the "Lesser Scroll of Dialing Wisdom," which was intended to be used by Customer Service agents as part of connections troubleshooting training.

We've had the blessing of obtaining two revisions of this "Great(er) Scroll" document and a 1998 revision of the "Lesser Scroll". The two revisions of the "Great(er) Scroll" include the latest known revision (June 25, 1999), and one written on January 7, 1998, both of which were sent by contributors who will stay anonymous. We don't intend to cover much else about the documents in detail here, but if you'd like, you can either download them from our content archive under "First-Gen WebTV and MSN TV > Server Documentation > Greater Scroll of Dialing Wisdom", or you can view them directly from our web server:

Great(er) Scroll

January 7, 1998 "Greater Scroll" revision (plain text): http://wiki.webtv.zone/misc/greaterscroll/GreaterScroll_1998-01-07.txt

June 25, 1999 revision (HTML): http://wiki.webtv.zone/misc/greaterscroll/GreaterScroll_1999-06-25.html

Lesser Scroll

May 28, 1998 revision (HTML): http://wiki.webtv.zone/misc/greaterscroll/LesserScroll_1998-05-28.html