Can You Work in Netscape Time?

Jamie Zawinski was fried.

He had fallen into the habit of working two days straight, sleeping for six hours, then beginning another two-day shift. During the time he was at the office, which was most of the time, he was focusing his time and energy on fixing bugs generated by his fellow programmers at Netscape Communications Corporation.

Bugs.

Painful, but no big deal. Except they were becoming a bigger deal by the day. The company was just weeks away from shipping the first commercial version of its software for the Internet, the Netscape Navigator. A week after its release, a million people might be using Zawinski's code to browse the World Wide Web's skyrocketing assortment of data files, audio clips, and digital images. Every moment counted; every detail mattered.

Suddenly, without warning, Zawinski's computer decided to reboot. All his pending fixes and unsent e-mails -- an electronic record of hours of drudgery punctuated by flashes of inspiration -- were vaporized.

Zawinski screamed.

He pounded his fists and knocked over his computer.

His chair, now a four-legged projectile, flew across the room. He put on his coat and left.

"I was pretty sure I had just quit," said the young programmer, whose goatee, partially shaven head with braids-cum-dreadlocks, and uncensored outlook on life made him something of a hero to his coding colleagues. ("We all enter this world in the same way: naked; screaming; soaked in blood," reads the epigraph that begins Zawinski's personal home page on the Web. "But if you live your life right, that kind of thing doesn't have to stop there.")

A few days later, Zawinski was back. Back poring over the thousands of lines of code that comprised his project -- a version of the Navigator aimed at the power tool of choice for Net junkies: the Unix workstation. Only three pieces of evidence offered any trace of his tantrum: the word "Angry" scrawled on a business card that listed his job title as Hacker; the hastily assembled effigy (a computer case covered with a blanket, a set of headphones sitting on top) that occupied his empty chair; and a quick addition to a collection of unofficial T-shirts that functioned as a time line of life at Netscape.

The "chair with wings" T-shirt, if nothing else, served as a symbol of intensity in action. For Zawinski and his fellow programmers, intensity was everything.

This was the fall of 1994 -- less than eight months after Netscape took shape, more than eight months before it would go public in one of the most frenzied initial public offerings in history. Today that IPO is the stuff of business legend. It valued the young company, with just $16 million in revenues, at more than $2 billion. It left Netscape's 24-year-old cofounder, Marc Andreessen, holding shares worth nearly $60 million and its other cofounder, computer veteran Jim Clark, 51, with shares worth half a billion dollars. It reserved a pool of 4.5 million shares for 26-year-old Jamie Zawinski and the other rank-and-file Netscapers -- a pool worth about $250 million. More than just creating wealth, the IPO also captured the popular imagination. Virtually overnight, Netscape was perceived as the defining company of the Age of the Web.

Back in 1994, as he decided to return to work on the Navigator for Unix, Jamie Zawinski wasn't thinking about defining an era. He and his colleagues were thinking about survival. Sure Netscape had one of the best pedigrees in Silicon Valley history. Its first $4 million came from Clark, the Stanford University professor turned entrepreneur whose first business creation, Silicon Graphics, makes the superfast visual workstations that have revolutionized everything from industrial design to filmmaking. Another $4 million came from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the most unimpeachable names in high-tech venture capital. But even the best pedigree can't pay the bills, and in the fall of 1994, Netscape was down to its last million dollars. It was running out of money.

Worse, it was running out of time. Soon after they created their company, Clark and Andreessen had assembled ten programmers, nearly all of them in their twenties, six of them friends of Andreessen from college. To these young programmers, Clark and Andreessen presented a life-or-death challenge: obliterate Mosaic, the very product that brought the two founders together in the first place.

Marc Andreessen was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, writing code for $6.85 an hour at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, when he and a fellow student, Eric Bina, became intrigued by the potential of the World Wide Web, a new technology for linking the resources of the Internet. But the Web lacked a rich graphical interface -- an intuitive way for people to unearth the vast material it stored. In a wild burst of coding in the winter of 1993, Andreessen and Bina wrote the basics of a graphical Web browser called Mosaic. Almost singlehandedly, their work turned the Web into the business and pop-culture phenomenon it is today. They had created The Next Big Thing.