Code Rush: The Inside Story of Netscape

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Today we take great web browsers for granted -- there are several free and open options, and they all seem to work pretty well. But a decade ago, we were still used to paying cash money for new browser releases, and Netscape was doing battle with Microsoft in the courts as well as con users' desktops. In the rush to ship new and better products, and change the browser marketplace, Netscape was about to do something radical: go open source.

Netscape was also about to merge with AOL -- not exactly an awesome chapter in corporate history -- but one that makes for some great TV. Code Rush is a documentary filmed in 1998 at that crucial moment in Netscape history (and by extension, web history), and Andy Baio has posted the hard-to-find film online. If you're a certain kind of nerd (one who's into software, web/computer history, or PBS documentaries in general), you'll love this:

See more information from Baio, including a torrent of the high-quality version and information on various interviews in the program.

Related viewing: Baio also recently posted The Machine That Changed the World, a general history of computing. Also, yesterday Microsoft's Internet Explorer team sent the Mozilla team a cake to celebrate the Firefox 3 launch (read the link for what they did in 1997 to celebrate their Internet Explorer 4.0 launch...).