Jamie Zawinski's journal of the early days of Netscape — in particular, of his race to build and ship the first Unix versions of the browser — is astonishgly good and nostalgic at the same time (I remember installing Jamie's early Netscape betas on an SGI that I was running in the early 90s).
The power came back on, and we put the damnable program on the FTP server, and two million people all started attempting to download it at once, before we had even posted the announcement message, and we're done done done and I suppose now we can all live happily ever after.
We sat in the conference room and hooked up the big TV to one of the Indys, so that we could sit around in the dark and watch the FTP download logs scroll by. jg hacked up an impromptu script that played the sound of a cannon shot each time a download successfully completed. We sat in the dark and cheered, listening to the explosions.
Four hours later, the Wall Street Journal was delivered, and it already contained an article describing what we had just done. "Clients aren't where the money is anyway," ran the quote from Marc.
I'd go home now if I thought I could drive there without dying, so instead I'm going to curl up under my desk again and sleep here.
Maybe we're not doomed; people on the net are talking about Mozilla with all caps and lots of exclamation points. They're actually excited about it…
I've just noticed that there's still purple ink on the inside of my right wrist spelling the word VOID: the hand-stamp from a concert that I went to last week. I left work, went to the show, and came back to work immediately afterwards. I've been here since.
