Jamie Zawinski
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Jamie W. Zawinski (born c. 1971 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA), commonly known as jwz, is a computer programmer, responsible for significant contributions to the free software projects Mozilla and XEmacs, and early versions of the proprietary Netscape Navigator web browser. He is also the proprietor of the DNA Lounge, a nightclub in San Francisco.
He was first hired by Scott Fahlman's Lisp research group at Carnegie Mellon University, and in the early 1990s by Richard P. Gabriel's Lucid Inc., where he was eventually put to work on Lucid's proprietary Energize [[C++]] IDE; a major portion of the IDE was a text editor. Lucid decided to use GNU Emacs due to its free license, popularity, and extensibility. When the project ran into problems, Zawinski and the other programmers were forced to begin making fundamental changes to GNU Emacs to add new functionality; tensions over how to merge these patches into the main tree eventually led to the famous GNU Emacs/XEmacs fork [1].
Zawinski worked on the early releases of Netscape Navigator, particularly the 1.0 release of the Unix version. He became quite well known in the early days of the world wide web through two easter eggs in the Netscape browser: typing "about:jwz" into the address box would take the user to his home page (a similar trick worked for other Netscape staffers), and users running a Unix or Macintosh version of the browser would see the Netscape throbber change to a ship's compass when a page was loading.
Zawinski was a major proponent of opening the source code of the Mozilla browser, but became disillusioned with the project when it was decided that the code would have to be rewritten. He resigned from Netscape Communications Corporation on April 1, 1999. [2] His current occupation is now running the DNA Lounge nightclub in San Francisco.
He still actively maintains the XScreenSaver project, used by most open source Unix-like operating systems for screenblanking.
External links
- Personal homepage
- DNA Lounge
- XScreenSaver
- jwz's LiveJournal
- jwz switched to Mac OS X
- Template:Nndb name
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