Project Code Rush - The Beginnings of Netscape / Mozilla Documentary

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Published 2013-08-12

Code Rush is a documentary following the lives of a group of Netscape engineers in Silicon Valley. It covers Netscape's last year as an independent company, from their announcement of the Mozilla open source project until their acquisition by AOL. It particularly focuses on the last minute rush to make the Mozilla source code ready for release by the deadline of March 31 1998, and the impact on the engineers' lives and families as they attempt to save the company from ruin.
Code Rush by David Winton is licensed under a CC 3.0 US License.
clickmovement.org/coderush
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The Film

Code Rush. The year is early 1998, at the height of dot-com era, and a small team of Netscape code writers frantically works to reconstruct the company's Internet browser. In doing so they will rewrite the rules of software development by giving away the recipe for its browser in exchange for integrating improvements created by outside unpaid developers. The fate of the entire company may well rest on their shoulders. Broadcast on PBS, the film capture the human and technological dramas that unfold in the collision between science, engineering, code, and commerce.
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 US license.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Rush

All Comments (21)

@MauriceKon 7 years ago

I love how at the end he said that this whole internet thing can easily turn into television with only a few people controlling what we see. that so became true ....
@samuel.soderberg 5 years ago

I’ve watched this documentary far too many times. It captures everything about IT in the 90’s so perfectly well!
@stingfan4 6 years ago

"Computers aren't the thing, they're the thing that gets you to the thing"
@MatthewReiser123 5 years ago

Was an engineer at Netscape 1996-98. Much of that time was a blur. I can certainly relate to 35:24
@mgabrysSF 8 years ago

I arrived in Silicon Valley (the first time anyway long-term) just before the bubble burst in April of 2000. Even at the tail-end it was an insane experience. Thx for posting!
@hinkhall5291 2 years ago

If you build software this doc is both very interesting and anxiety inducing.
@MylarBalloonLove 5 years ago

I used Netscape in the early 2000s... good browser R.I.P. Netscape 1994-2008
@JustWickedSwede 9 years ago

Oh Netscape.. You brought me much joy. :)
@HashimAziz1 2 years ago

Probably the best tech documentary I've seen to date. Packs so much into such a short running time, especially about the actual process of writing and debugging code.
@ProgrammerInProgress 10 years ago

I thoroughly enjoyed this, it's great to see as a developer how software was written by teams in the 90's, it seemed pretty chaotic, with developers setting their hours of work, anyone who writes code knows it's way too tempting to keep working and working at a problem and burning out in the process. For the most part, there's a lot of structure and sanity in the industry, architecture plays a much bigger role, and the tools have improved immensely, but none of this would have happened without the folk in this video.
@westjgames1 10 years ago

53:40 Yes, that is happening now...
@Tux.Penguin 8 years ago

Glad I watched this. Tons of colorful detail in the story, a story I often wondered about but never really knew.
@t8z5h3 8 years ago

Funny thing is Netscape never recovered but Mozilla lives on
@OutyBanjo 6 years ago

I'll bet you Jamie was so stoked when The Matrix came out.
@cotedazure 6 years ago

Great to watch this awesome documentary almost two decades later! I almost forgot Netscape Navigator once came in a box.
@Eggs-n-Jakey 3 months ago

That mom deserves an award, so well spoken.
@kajzec 5 months ago

Year after year, I come back to this documentary for ... a glimpse into the 90's Silicon Valley tech scene, inspiration, nostalgia for a time and place I haven't wasn't a part of? I don't know. But there is something about this documentary that drives me to it.
@daevyd100 6 years ago

This is such a sweet documentary, thanks for the upload!
@Locutus 11 months ago

Thanks for uploading this video. I remember watching this video 20 years ago as a kid. I found it fascinating.
@smoothbeak 3 years ago

I really love this documentary. To me it's about a bunch of misfits who are highly intelligent and highly dysfunctional, on some mission that everyone excepts to fail, partaking in the overconsumption of junk food and coca-cola. Let's be honest, they at least had more fun than the people working at Microsoft :)