AMERICA ONLINE TAKES LEAD IN CYBER-POP SCENE.

Byline: Todd Copilevitz Dallas Morning News

It's Friday night, rush hour. In several hundred chat rooms, people from across the country are debating politics, arguing about trivia, offering emotional support and trying to pick up total strangers.

Others wander to the ABC-TV corner, where they find news and gossip about the latest shows and current events, or they can check out fashion news from Elle magazine or track their investments. Still others surf the Net. On America Online, it's all just a mouse click away.

The country's largest and fastest-growing network isn't on television or radio. It exists only on computer screens.

In less than a decade, America Online has grown from a tiny 50,000-member service for Commodore and Apple computers into a pop-culture phenomenon. It's often mistakenly called American Online, but the fact that AOL is mentioned at all by talk show hosts, comedians and cartoonists speaks volumes about its rising star.

Behind the scenes of AOL is a frenetic world of computer nerds, creative artists, fervent on-line staffers and driven marketers. Long days and even all-nighters are common. All employees are shareholders, and their common cause is evident.

The service is growing so rapidly that vice presidents surrender large offices so new staff members have a place to sit. Every couple of months the public relations department has to fire off a new press release tracking the soaring enrollment.

"Keeping up with all that's going on is impossible," says spokeswoman Margaret Ryan. "But you can just feel the energy walking through the halls. There's always something new happening."

In 1996, AOL will expand into Germany, France and the United Kingdom. Already, tens of thousands of people in the United States take up AOL's offer every day, assuming such screen names as Ted0932, RunCoach29 or DoctormyIs. Then they're off for a jaunt in cyberspace.

When they log on, a friendly voice greets them with "Welcome!" and "You've got mail," if appropriate. It's the closest thing users will find to a grand entrance in cyberspace.

Few AOL staff members are over 30, and anyone with more than a couple of years at the company is considered a veteran. The staff is so new that no one seems to remember whose voice it is that welcomes users when they sign on.

There are, of course, other ways consumers make their way into the on-line world. CompuServe and Prodigy are older services and offer lots of diversity. Local companies, called Internet service providers, cost less and offer direct connections to the Internet. But AOL has the enviable success rate.

In November, the service hit a grand slam, winning four major awards as the best consumer on-line service. Family PC Magazine, PC Magazine, Online Access Magazine and the Information Industry Association all gave AOL top honors among the major on-line services.

"The reason is really simple: We put a friendly face on technology," says AOL founder and chief executive Steve Case. "Consumers don't really care how the service is created, all they care about is their experience."

Technology is essential to AOL. Computers, phone lines and wiring are the guts of the service. Dependability is the watchword.

Three steel pipes running down the wall of a second-floor office are easily mistaken for plumbing. For 4.5 million AOL users, they are the front door to their adventures on line.

Every second, messages from tens of thousands of users spill out of the fiber-optic lines in those pipes. The users have dialed a local number and have been connected to AOL headquarters.

Nearly 90 percent of the country's population can use one of the local numbers. For those who can't, there's an 800 number that charges eight cents a minute.

For each major city, there's a cabinet-full of computers and communications equipment.

On each AOL member's screen, a message appears that the password is being confirmed. Several rows away from the cabinets, 4-foot-tall black Tandem processors take control of the call. These powerful machines are AOL's cash registers, logging in all users, tracking how long they're on and where they go.

Some portions of the service, such as stock quotes, run off relatively simple computers, banks of Pentium-based processors similar to those available at an electronics store. Other portions of the service are based in rows of industrial-strength server computers, any one of which has enough computing power for a large corporation.

The computers are the key to AOL's very existence, and they're afforded the utmost security and resources. Most employees will never see the computer rooms (even the workers are not authorized).

A floor away, a select staff monitors AOL's heartbeat in a secured control room. More than a dozen screens track use, warn of impending system problems and, most important, keep tabs on traffic at all those local hubs people use for access.

"When a user gets a busy signal trying to log in, it may be that there's no modem available," says Matt Korn, AOL's vice president for development. "But more often than not there's a modem waiting, the problem is that the phone company hasn't allocated us enough capacity."

The number of calls America Online can accept at one time changes constantly, depending on how much capacity the phone company allocates.

To solve the problem, one control room worker does nothing but talk to phone companies across the country, adjusting the capacity to fit the demand. At midday, just before Christmas, a monitor in the corner noted that 37,944 people were on line.

"Just wait a couple hours, then watch that thing go nuts," says a worker sitting nearby.

America Online officials won't say what peak capacity is.

Peak usage is similar to prime time for television: four hours at night, after dinner, before bedtime. Allowing for time zones, the control room has an eight-hour prime-time period.

At the same time, hundreds of telephone support staffers are constantly on duty in Florida and Arizona to handle questions and problems for people who can't get on line. Nonetheless, mustering enough telephone support has been a recurring problem for AOL, forcing massive expansion and often long hold times for callers.

For those who do get on line, AOL has an army of 5,500 guides, forum leaders and other quasi-official personnel available to help the lost, correct the ill-behaved and generally make sure all is well. Most are selected from the ranks of members, having earned a strong reputation for their role on line. They range from teen-agers to senior citizens, all working from home in exchange for free time on line.

Content is king, interactivity is essential. Those are the guideposts for everything that happens on AOL. Each of the company's 14 main menu options is set up to operate like a specialty cable network; at AOL they're called channels.

Most offices at AOL are buried under paper and unpacked boxes. But the Cool studio has surfboards hanging from the ceiling, a chart on the wall monitoring staff caffeine consumption, and an explanation of the Combustion Irritability Scale. The studio's eight members are known simply as the Cool Team.

"This is the place where we try out the latest technology before passing it along," says Kathy Ryan, vice president of production. "We experiment with new kinds of graphics, look for new ways to bring experiences to the members."

On computers in the studio, there are prototype AOL sections. Some will never make it to AOL members, because they are so loaded with music and special effects that they are unmanageable.

And that's because it would take too long for most modems to transmit the content. Designers must limit the art and music they send to fit the speed of most users' modems. At the moment, that's 14,400 baud.

"We try to be mindful of the customers' experience," Ryan says. "They're not interested in a site that requires a huge download of art every time they click an icon.

"Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that we're not designing for customers with Pentium machines and ultra-high-speed connections."

How popular is AOL? Take a look at some of the people who came on line to talk with members: Mick Jagger, Oprah Winfrey, Woody Allen and President Clinton. Each of them took a place on the stage of a virtual auditorium, then fielded questions from an audience of thousands.

For the celebrities on stage, making an on-line appearance creates a unique set of complications - and some pleasant surprises, Ryan says. And, contrary to rumors, the celebrities listed really are there answering questions.

"That comes up a lot, I think, because people, especially actors and actresses, don't come across on line the way people are used to seeing them," says Amy Arnold, head of AOL Live.

FACTS ABOUT AMERICA ONLINE

THE COST: It costs $9.95 per month to subscribe to AOL. The first five hours you spend on line are free each month. After that, the cost is $2.95 an hour. Software for Macintosh or PC is often sold with computer books and magazines, or it may be ordered by calling [phone].

ON THE OTHER END OF THE LINE: Here's what's going on at America Online when users dial its headquarters in Vienna, Va.:

Average simultaneous users: 90,000

Average length of membership: 40 months

Average monthly use per member: 6.5 hours

1995 on-line service revenues: $358.5 million

A GIANT NETWORK: No one knows for sure how many services there are on AOL: They lost count. It's hard even to estimate how much storage space the whole network requires. But the Internet news groups alone take up one terrabyte; that's the equivalent of a 1 million-megabyte hard drive.

SOURCE: Dallas Morning News

CAPTION(S):

PHOTO[ordinal indicator, masculine]CHART

Photo (1--Color) AOL employees Dino Paxenos, left, and Jason Pentecost work on a page. Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service (2) "We put a friendly face on technology," says America Online founder and chief executive Steve Case. Knight-Ridder Tribune Photo Service Box FACTS ABOUT AMERICA ONLINE (See text)