Zawinski's programming career began at age 16 with
Scott Fahlman's
Spice Lisp project at
Carnegie Mellon University. He then worked at AI startup Expert Technologies, Inc. followed by
Robert Wilensky and
Peter Norvig's AI research group at
UC Berkeley, working on
natural language processing. In 1990 he began working at
Lucid Inc., first working on
Lucid Common Lisp, and then on Lucid's Energize
C++ IDE. Lucid decided to use
GNU Emacs as the text editor for their IDE due to its free license, popularity, and extensibility, and Zawinski led that project. As Zawinski and the other programmers made fundamental changes to GNU Emacs to add new functionality, tensions over how to merge these patches into the main tree eventually led to the
fork of the project into GNU Emacs and Lucid Emacs (now
XEmacs). In 1992 he released the first version of
XScreenSaver, a
free and open-source collection now containing more than 240
screensavers. Initially released for
Unix, it now supports
macOS,
iOS, and
Android as well. On Unix systems, it also provides the framework for blanking and locking the screen. He still maintains it, with new releases coming out several times a year.
Netscape and Mozilla Following Lucid's
bankruptcy in 1994, Zawinski was one of the initial employees of
Mosaic Communications, later known as
Netscape. At Netscape, he developed the
Unix release of
Netscape Navigator 1.0, and later,
Netscape Mail, the first mail reader (or
Usenet reader) to natively support
HTML. Zawinski came up with the name "
Mozilla" (originally the internal code-name of the web browser) during a staff meeting, as a reference to
Godzilla and a
portmanteau of "
Mosaic killer". An
easter egg he coded in the Netscape browser became quite well known during the early days of the
World Wide Web: typing "about:jwz" into the address box would take the user to his home page, and would change the browser's logo animation to a fire-breathing dragon. Through his long-time support and advocacy for
free software both inside and outside the company, Zawinski is credited with having been the inspiration for Netscape's decision to
open-source the
source code of the browser in 1998. He was a founder of
Mozilla.org, personally registering its domain name on the day of Netscape's open source announcement and helping design and run the organization through its first year. When Netscape was acquired by
AOL in 1999, he wrote a bulletin explaining that Mozilla's work would continue with or without Netscape. And a year after the initial source code release, he resigned from Netscape and Mozilla, citing his disappointment that others involved in the project had decided to rewrite the code instead of incrementally improving it.
DNA Lounge Shortly after leaving Mozilla, he announced his purchase of
DNA Lounge, a
nightclub in
San Francisco. Zawinski purchased the nightclub in 1999 for approximately 5 million dollars and it was re-opened in July 2001, a process which he documented extensively in a blog named "DNA Sequencing". In 2016, he explored alternative funding ideas to keep the venue afloat during a downturn in attendance. ==Interviews and appearances==