Netscape Documentary

Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

Tone

What do you attribute your own success to...Well lets go back and hear

little bit about your youth

Well grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania jrwas_an nglihjcaclxiJd been

reading since really young age thinks thats ahigpartof-whFmgoodatwhatI dos

just urn writing skills Ithink isabig of what writing code is its the same of
part part

your brain Urn got interested in

computers pretty young We had TRX 80s at
my

middle school and you know played around with them after school no one would really

them
use for any thing played games you know was interested in thern because 10

year olds like video games guess Urn and ended up teaching rny self by reading

books about and ended up

programming basically teaching myself to
program without

actually having computer just reading the books thought it was interesting Urn and

uh then in
guess it was 11th grade or lth...yeah late 11th grade friend of mine

um Dan Zigman managed to he was going to Macintosh users group meeting at

Carnegie Mellon University which is in Pittsburgh and he mentioned to someone some

random person there that he had been teaching himself this USP
programming language

which we both had gotten Id been and the guy he was

doing this reading the book

talking to was like oh you know LISP and youre like 14 years old You should go talk

to you should go ask Scott Bowman for job ha ha And so he did And uh Bowman

hired us both urn time after grunt work

just as part school in his lab
doing basically

Um mean programming grunt work And um so did that and that was you know lot

more fun and paid better than my previous job which was route And after
paper

graduated high school after

barely graduated high school uh knew that just couldnt

handle going to college It just the structure was just not working for me couldnt

couldnt take it So asked around and found some folks who through the university

who were who had this small start and went work That was
up to there place called

Expert Technologies And we were doing urn Expert Systems that paginate the yellow

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pages its just dont know sounds kind of dull but actually there was lot to it because

the yellow pages are way more complicated than you could possibly imagine or than they

have any right to be Urn and that was basically doing Al kind of stuff Um was there

for about and half years uh company went out of business as start do and uh
ups

my girlfriend at the time had had graduated high school and was going to UC Berkeley so

uh followed her out here managed to get ajob working for the University at Berkeley

and um doing more AT research and after that went to work for Lucid urn who were

who made progranmiing environments development systems for LISP and and C-i-

And uh worked there for while after that Netscape

Do you have any sort of sense why Silicon Valley has become such Mecca

for both the hardware and Software industry

This is just where happened It could have been anywhere One did learn
thing that
it

when was in and find had

living Pittsburgh trying to ajob out here silly idea that
thin5

should have ajob here before moved was its impossible do

that to that unless youre

well known hot shot Because there so here who do the

really are just many people can

work why are they going to fly sorneone out from the east coast for an interview when

theres on their door Its and you know its

guy knocking just viscous cycle which

causes people to come out here for the jobs because this is where the companies are And

its even more focused than that Here we are sitting in restaurant 30 miles away from

Netscape and all of the industry the whole industry is down there in Mountain View and

Palo Alto and San Jose Urn San Francisco is too far
away Um the odd thing is that the

sort of publishing side of this industry the you know the Wireds and folks like that are all

like down the street And Im sure that if

you were starting high tech magazine you

know this neighborhood would be be because where

the place to this is it is and its

random chance thats the case

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Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

Mhy did you at young age did you decide this was good thing to know

and what keeps you doing it

So youre asking whats the appeal of programming you know whats the appeal of

anything you do something and you get result at the end of then day You get something

you can pint at and say look did that Its just different kind of thing Urn photography

people are pointing camera taking pictures and then some time later they go and they

do mystical magical things with chemicals and something shows up on paper And theres

nib
lot of separation and time between those two events its the same kind of thing

Whats the most amazing thing to you about Communicator or about the

things that Netscape does Is the internet ultimately computing for the

masses

Um well lot of people everybody has different motivations one of my big motivations

has been ilike to that Iwant use And thats

always writezrams to lot of the

random hacks Ive

little that written on my own time write them because want them

And then you know if Im lucky it turns out maybe someone else will want them too But

thats you know thats secondary effect Um the best part about what we did at

Netscape as far as Im concerned is the mass appeal Its like Ive finally written

program that
my mom would care about and that random people who arent programmers

would care about lot of the world

hacking is
very its very incestuous its self

referential youre youre one of the odd things about the

projects we worked the

products we made at Lucid was we were writing programs that were to make writing

programs easier Which is great cause mean obviously thats something we would use

right Were writing programs all day and so programs that make writing programs easier

makes sense But it was impossible to to someone who wasnt in the

explain industry you

know what was

the hell it
you did why it would be of use to someone um not that its

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

not important or useful lot out of it it was fun but its

definitely go just totally

different universe when youre writing code that the masses are gonna use Ijust love th

Is there way you were talking about code writing being analogous to writing prose Is

them way to understand for lay person...reading the commands and sense that
getting

oh yes You know one of the aspirations of our film is to show what would you have us

do if that was the assignment

Urn think would

that be really boring mean you know we could try it but would

just not expect that to end up being theres nothing to see you know mean imagine

watching someone write Theyre gonna be staring at blank page for long time and

then theyre gonna do some typing and then theyre gonna crumple up piece of paper

theyre gonna look up word in the dictionary you know uh its not exciting its urn

You know like the movie Hackers think is just great movie wish our lives were like

that wish we were roller skating around in Spandex and fighting bad guys but you

know its not tssjnjpg4narqpi A1 mean thats not fair

either because its its not like you know being typist but all of the dialog is internal

you cant capture it on film lot of what do day to day urn especially lately with this

tproject havent been writing any code Ive been doing lot of organizing and writing text

and making sure that things happen at the time like which
right Doing rnanagernent stuff is

kind of horrifying to me because never thought would be in that world But um spend

most of the day interacting with people but you know doing it
through e-mail So you

cant see it You know and Ill have conversation with someone and its not and
give

take thing send off and hour back And you know
message half later they write two

dozen of these conversations are going on at the same time You cant follow that on film

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Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

Does it is that sort of where the world is moving is the work

environment at Netscape kind of like the work environment well all live in

to some degree down the road

Well you know youll hear both sides of it Oh its just tool or oh its gonna change the

world and were not going to be able to understand what the future is like and neither of

those are true think its an enormous world operates on

really change in the way the the

of the
big Its you know
level or the television or movies think its that the
telephone

Lst19Y0n But those didnt happen over night you know there was no culture

shock there it just oh look theres this new thing if do things this its little
way easier

its more convenient and you know 10 years down the road you look back and its like
ar
you remember what the world was like before we had teller machinesAwhen you had to
Ld0

go into bank to get money sort of vaguely remember that was but
really young

cant imagine that that would just be so inconvenien dpeOplehou know

think its the same kind of thing Were gonna-in the future were gonna jjgum
lot more decentralization People n4 needing to be in the same place at the same time

computers are to make easier bandwidth up and tele

going that Especially once the
gets

presence kind of things actually work Video conferencing or whatever Um the systems

that exist are pretty crummy but thats gonna thatll be fixed Um -1 .--

Do you feel
you have to work harder today than 10 years ago

Well think that the people at Netscape know we do what we do because we

you like it

Or we dont we
becausven if admit that like it
sometimes we work hard because were

obsessive freaks have always

People been that
way Some people aresome people arent

You know you do what

you do Um its an interesting question because Ive read some

things about how this idea that the amount of work that do in their
people day to day life

isnt really necessary to maintain society as it is but its just habit We do it because were

used to our lives

living that
way and look back at hunter gatherer tribes They were idle all

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the times you know they just hung out and were hairy or whatever it is they did And

the industrial revolution sort of put this this notion that them was work and there was the

rest of your life and you had to have firm distinction between them Urn so dont

know its an interesting question dont know the answer to it think it would be it

would be precedent suggests that assuming that technology is going to make all our lives

thats going to happen because people wouldnt know

what to do with that time if they had it lot of times people are concerned about

computers taking away jobs But you know theyre1akaEI.thelheyre

taking away the jobs that the de-humanizing jobs the jobs where you dont have to think

Ithinkthatsagoodthing

couple more questions and then well move on

What does it take to be good to want to be good programmer and

to be good code writer

Thats uh and impossible question to answer think know if are

you...you you you

know it
already Its at least on the hacker side of things On the artist side of things its

just something you do something you have Youve got youll find and interest and you

know that thats what you do On the engineering side you know school Um think

approaching the world that way is dull but thats me do this because like doing it

not because its ajob and it well

pays

Jim Clark made the comment that he thought the academy is no longer the

source of great technological innovation in society its businesses like

Netscape Do you think thats true

dont know theres no black and white answer there think theres certainly merit to the

idea that if someones willing to pay you for

program the
program must be doing

something interesting but dont believe that the free market solves all problems because

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Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

its simple system and just like businesses are and you set up the rules and you let the

thing play out and if

you pick the right set of rules youll reach the goal you have youre

striving for but theres no intelligence behind it theres no direction its just following

set of rules Its much like

program Urn theres definitely interesting stuff that comes

out of universities that wouldnt ever come out of the fee market But then you know you

could look the other

at it
way and say that Universities are the result of the free market

because they were created by these you know capitalists back in the 30s or whatever

funding universities and building libraries and um you know the truth of he matter is that

lot of those people did it as task loophole not because they had some altruistic
great

desire So maybe it does work that

way But dont think you can really just oh
say

Universities are useless now think thats kind of an over simplification

When 331 happens describe couple of the days leading up to it and then

what happens

Yeah urn well if we hit our schedule there wont be mad scramble well have

everything to go and almost week before the thing goes out well have had few
already

people unpack it and try to build it and well know that it

basically works on of
couple

systems and then it will

go out dont think thats very likely theres going to be mad

scramble of some kind and if we knew what the nature of that mad scramble would be we

wouldnt be having mad scramble Urn the announce it will

go on the FT site and an

announcement will go on the website and be mailed out to few people and then our

Networks going to melt down and no one will be able to down load it and there will be

disasters all over the place And you know

the rnailer will stop working things are going

to fall apart We saw it when .9 went out and its gonna happen again And maybe it

wont mean maybe were more on top of the network situation this time But the fact is

that we have no idea how many people are going to try to download this thing Um its
bigger package than an executable version of Netscape but theres smaller group of

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Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

people who well who should be interested in it because it

only appeals to developers and

not to end users Then theres going to be sizable of people who just dont know
group

what theyre doing who down load right no matter how we

it
anyway try to set

expectations So its urn its going to be crazy After the release out urn then will
goes

be the time for damage where we we

control try to explain to people told you what this

was we told you it was going to be hard to compile and pieces were going to be missing

and its going to take lot of work you know And you know if we set expectation right

before hand that there wont be so much of that but theres going to be lot of that

anyway SSnetirne later were going to have to manage the contributions that people atel

going to try to send back Actually dont remember what the various bets were but

people were betting on you know hew may hours after the release do we get the

patch mailed in And that question comes down to how does take to compile
long it

really case the random Nets gonna do

thing some looser on the
first there
is
gonna disable

the blinic tag right the big boogie rnan of thQ blit tSeople just loved complaining about

even though its utterly meaningless in the scheme of things In the term
grand long it

gets.__m1
more interesting The first few weeks rnaybe even the first month or two after the release

is just gonna be rnanaging the confusion of the people out on the Net would guess After

that it
gets more interesting when were trying to figure out how to work with all
actually

these people and be organized enough that we can take their changes and incorporate them

and theres give and take there and thats when itself Makes
Mozilla.org proves people

realize that working together is to be mutual benefit

actually going

Will Mozilla.org be accorded the claim the

right will it mantle of the old

Netscape

Well think Mozilla.orgs the interesting place to be just because its uh rnean its free

And Ive done

source effort that before and think its great stuff Um but the the fact is

that Mozilla.org isnt where the code written Its its and thats
gets coordination

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gonna drive me nuts you know not writing code for while mean wont be able to do

that So Im gonna be doing something writing code on the side anyway because thats

just who am But um think once people figure out how the word works the people

who are working in client are to be better time than they now
eng today going having are

anyway because theyre gonna able getting more immediate feedback in their work

Theyre still gonna be writing code that

goes into Communicator theyre going to be doing

the same basic job they are doesnt

today urn assuming Netscape go insane but people

peers will be away and and commenting

their seeing it
not just using it on but
right it

making it better And everyone likes to ship something that actually works So think

itsgonnabeagoodthing

T1
think thats
34
probably
\p
battle dont know maybe should
pretty interesting give you

some background on thatIhis will be the bitterness portion of tonights entertainment

Urn before we before 2.0 existed Mark comes into

my cube and says uh think we

need mail reader And we sat down and talked about it for while About well should

we buy mail reader from someone or should we write one and and one of the big

benefits sort of the whole point of what we ye done with Mozilla is that with

Coimmirncator or Navigator or whatever its called tq jttbat it

take it acts as an

integrator7t takes different protocols and puts the same interface on them People dont

have to ºare how theyre getting the information It just the click on link and there it is

You dont have to worry about the under pinnings whether its FPT or HEDD or GOPHER

or what not And thats one of the strengths of the mail reader that we wrote is that its

also the same

tightly integrated into
space Its you get messages and it doesnt matter how

you got them and you can click on links and just as if you were looking on text and it all

sort of works out

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Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

And so we wrote so went and sat in cafes for few weeks and designed this really

simple mail reader that was sort of an end user kind of thing knew that programmers

were going to be unhappy with this because it didnt do the 10 zillion things programmers

demand that mail readers do but it was going to be goon enough for mom and pop to use

And uh then you know we argued about the design and then shortly after that Tarry

Weisman got hired and he and wrote the mail reader And the news reader and the mail

and news reader are he same thing mean thats an example of hiding the distinction when

its not important And uh you know that worked out pretty well We wrote it
pretty

quickly and it was lot of fun and we got something that was useable and shortly after

that we bought Collabra who had sort of mail news group-ware kind of project and ua
basically mean it never really made sense to me why we were buying them because we

already had product that did that and it was better but we bought them And basically

what happened is their their whole company of Netscapes

got put in charge destiny

Netscape has habit of doing this and then them

LJ1I acquiring company letting mean

not just letting them take over but putting them in control of the whole direction of the

company Which is not really the best idea but theyve done this of times So
couple

basically jim the this whole like management structure got hired above me and was

like no thanks Ill

go work on something else Terry got sucked in to that that vortex

they actually bribed him by giving him T-l to his house laughs to continue on
working

it And so Jim did did the 3.0 version of the mail reader which is really just bug fix

release 3.0 should have been but out and features

called 2.1 it
got dragged got dumped in

And so the 4.0 mail reader is essentially re-write by the Collabra folks and you know as

far as Im concerned they totally screwed the pooch And jxnz John Fried who is sort of

the leader of that

group and hes an empire builder He likes his goal as far as Im
concerned is not to make the successful but make John Friend
company is to powerful

And shortly after the source release went out the announcement of the source release went

out this new project starts up called 4.5 which is the version numbers are an interesting

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Netscape Documentary
Tape 30 Jamie Zawinski Interview

political measure 1JCthe point of 4.5 is that theres mail server that we sell that does

IMAP which is mail protocol and the

support for IMAP in the 4.0 mail client is just

abysmally bad its unusable So they need to fix those bugs and add some new features so

that it talks to the mail server because the mail iis going out and if we ship mail

server and we dont have client that works right with that mail server were kind of not

in good position So rather than having like 4.0.5 or 4.1 release that fixes these bugs

hes got his whole organization going off to the side on this $4.5 branch which means that

its going to be much bigger project than fixing those couple of bugs Its going to suck

in resources and think that if 4.5 allowed to continue its gonna derail
is
any kind of 5.0

release this
year because theyre just going to pull too many resources away from it The

source to 4.5 the current plan is that the source to 4.5 wont go out So there will be this

whole other development effort and think that whats going on here is that..

break
_7 iq 71

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