Code Rush, the Mozilla Documentary from 2000

Posted by Andy Baio

In honor of the release of Firefox 3.0, I’m offering up a video that documented its very beginning in 1998 — the first open-source release of Netscape’s browser and the foundation of the Mozilla project.

Independent filmmakers followed the Mozilla team from March 1998 to April 1999, as they worked to open Netscape Communicator’s source code to the world, in a last-ditch effort to save the company. The result is an amazing snapshot of computer history, capturing the people that worked on it, the first internal beta test, the moment Jamie Zawinski uploaded the first builds publicly, the launch party, the all-hands meeting announcing the AOL acquisition, and so much more. It aired on PBS nationally in March 2000, the same month as the beginning of the dot-com collapse.

Out-of-print and never released on DVD, the used VHS copies start at $50 on Amazon. Like all the videos I release on Waxy.org, this material is commercially unavailable. If they ever come back into print, or the copyright holders contact me, I’ll take them down immediately.

Important Update (September 16): At the request of the the director, I’ve removed the video from Waxy.org and Viddler. I’ve interviewed the director about his plans for releasing the film and the unreleased footage.

Update (July 31): The documentary is back online, legally released under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve done my best to annotate the video, but many people in the film aren’t identified. I’ve left Viddler annotations open to everyone, so if you want to identify the people, places, or notable objects/events/trivia in the film, then please add your inline comments the video! (Or IM/email me and I’ll take care of it.)

The video’s now offline, but I’ve saved all the annotations. Thanks to Tman for creating the subtitle file, which can be used in video players like Media Player Classic or VLC, or simply viewed as plain text.

Now go download Firefox 3.0 and help make history!

Interviews and Appearances

The Machine That Changed the World: The World at Your Fingertips

Posted by Andy Baio

Here’s the fifth and final episode of The Machine That Changed the World, this one focusing on global information networks including the Internet, and the communication benefits and privacy risks they create. This is the most familiar material of the documentary, so I’m going to skip the notes and annotations this time. I hope you enjoyed the documentary as much as I did.

And, as promised, here’s the BitTorrent file for high-resolution copies of all five videos. It’s a 3.1GB download with five H.264 encoded MP4 files. (If you only want a single video, use your BitTorrent client to select only the videos you need.) Enjoy!

Watch them all: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Interviews:

Robert Lucky (AT&T Bell Labs), Dave Hughes, Kathleen Bonner (Trader, Fidelity), George Hayter (Former Head of Trading, London Stock Exchange), Ben Bagdikian (UC Berkeley), Arthur Miller (Harvard Law School), Forman Brown (songwriter, died in 1996), Tan Chin Nam (Chairman, National Computer Board of Singapore), B.G. Lee (Minister of Trade and Industry, Singapore), Lee Fook Wah, (Assistant Traffic Manager, MRT Singapore), David Assouline (French Activist, now a senator), Mitch Kapor (founder, Lotus), Michael Drennan (Air traffic controller, Dallas-Fort Worth)

The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer

Posted by Andy Baio

The third episode of The Machine That Changed the World covers the development of the personal computer and the modern graphical user interface, which made computing easy to use for everyone. Highlights include interviews with Apple’s Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, drawing with a computer in 1963, great footage from Xerox PARC, and some 1992-era predictions of the future from Apple and others.

Continue reading “The Machine That Changed the World: The Paperback Computer” →

The Machine That Changed the World: Inventing the Future

Posted by Andy Baio

The first part of The Machine That Changed the World covered the earliest roots of computing, from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace in the 1800s to the first working computers of the 1940s. The second part, “Inventing the Future,” picks up the story of ENIAC’s creators as they embark on building the first commercial computer company in 1950, and ends with the moon landing in 1969 and the beginning of the Silicon Valley.

Watch them all: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Notes:

Shortly after the war ended, ENIAC‘s creators founded the first commercial computer company, the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation in 1946. The early history of the company’s funding and progress is told through interviews and personal home videos. They underestimated the cost and time to build UNIVAC I, their new computer for the US Census Bureau, quickly sending the company into financial trouble. Meanwhile, in London, the J. Lyons and Co. food empire teamed up with the EDSAC developers at Cambridge to build LEO, their own computer to manage inventory and payroll. It was a huge success, inspiring Lyons to start building computers for other companies.

The Eckert-Mauchly company was in trouble, with several high-profile Defense Department contracts withdrawn because of a mistaken belief that John Mauchly had Communist ties. After several attempts to save the company, the company was sold to Remington-Rand in 1950. The company, then focused on electric razors and business machines, gave UNIVAC its television debut by tabulating live returns during the 1952 presidential election. To CBS’s amazement, it accurately predicted an Eisenhower landslide with only 1% of the vote. UNIVAC soon made appearances in movies and cartoons, leading to more business.

IBM was late to enter the computing business, though they’d built the massive SSEC in 1948 for scientific research. When the US Census ordered a UNIVAC, Thomas Watson, Jr. recognized the threat to the tabulating machine business. IBM introduced their first commercial business computers in 1953, the mass-produced IBM 650. While inferior technology, it soon dominated the market with their strong sales force, relative affordability, and integration with existing tabulating machines. In 1956, IBM soared past Remington-Rand to become the largest computer company in the world. By 1960, IBM captured 75% of the US computer market.

But developing software for these systems often cost several times the hardware itself, because programming was so difficult and programmers were hard to find. FORTRAN was one of the first higher-level languages, designed for scientists and mathematicians. It didn’t work well for business use, so COBOL soon followed. This led to wider adoption in different industries, as software was developed that could automate human labor. “Automation” become a serious fear, as humans were afraid they’d lose their jobs to machines. Across the country, companies like Bank of America (with ERMA) were eliminating thousands of tedious tabulating jobs with a single computer, though the country’s prosperity and booming job market tempered some of that fear.

In the ’50s, vacuum tubes were an essential component of the electronics industry, located in every computer, radio, and television. Transistors meant that far more complex computers could be designed, but couldn’t be built because wiring them together was a logistical nightmare. The “tyranny of numbers” was solved in 1959 with the first working integrated circuit, developed and introduced independently by both Texas Instruments and Fairchild. But ICs were virtually ignored until adopted by NASA and the military for use in lunar landers, guided missiles, and jets. Electronics manufacturers soon realized the ability to mass-produce ICs. Within a decade, ICs cost pennies to produce while becoming a thousand times more powerful. The result was the birth of the Silicon Valley and a reborn electronics industry.

Interviews:

Ted Withington (network engineer, industry analyst), Paul Ceruzzi (Smithsonian), J. Presper Eckert (ENIAC co-inventor, died 1995), Morris Hansen (former US Census Bureau, died 1990), John Pinkerton (Chief Engineer, LEO, died 1997), Thomas J. Watson, Jr. (Chairman Emeritus, IBM, died 1993), James W. Birkenstock (retired Vice President, IBM, died 2003), Jean Sammet (programming language historian), Dick Davis (retired Senior V.P., Bank of America), Robert Noyce (co-inventor, integrated circuit, died 1990), Gordon Moore (former Chairman of the Board, Intel), Steve Wozniak (Co-founder, Apple)

Up Next…

Part 3: The Paperback Computer. The development of the personal computer and user interfaces, from Doug Engelbart and Xerox PARC to the Apple and IBM PCs.

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