The secret history of "about:jwz", "about:mozilla" and the Netscape Throbbers.
I realized recently that while I have written about the history of the about:authors URL, I have never explained the history of the about:jwz easter egg. Well, I guess it's been long enough, so now it can be told.
Tags: computers, fanboys, firstperson, linux, nscp, retrocomputing, www
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19 Responses:
I have been dotcomrades with you for YEARS on lj, and it wasn't until you posted this article and I looked at your page source, and found out just what you've done. wow. i feel like i rubbed up against some sort of celebrity.
"dotcomrades" is my favorite new word.
Reading that made me feel happy. Thank you.
I'm curious now--where DID the compass icon come from originally? Just another in-house design?
It was one of the contest entries, and the (internal) votes didn't even name it one of the top 5! Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of the other entries, so I don't even have any record of who created it...
Wait, it lost out to THESE?! Augh.
Actually, now that I think about it, it's possible that it was an in-house design and not a contest entry... I don't remember!
I hope so. Regardless, it's clearly the superior choice!
You have, actually, though that was from the other end of the story.
But that text doesn't explain the actual easter egg (the compass).
So, the N is to blame for that word. I always kinda thought the term originated from the porn industry, like everything else on the Internet.
'The animation depicted the "N" expanding and contracting, thus explaining why these animations became known as throbbers.'
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throbber
The file in the source code where the "N" image lived was in fact named "throbber".
Maybe it's evident to everyone, but the bezel shadow changes as the N "throbs." That gives it the effect of being illuminated by a moving light source, which is the same idea as the meteor one.
No, it gives the effect of moving in and out. There is no moving light source that could give those shadows.
Funny archaeological footnote that didn't really fit with the rest:
I couldn't find a copy of the spinning-tiles "Mosaic" animation online anywhere! And of course the source code is long gone. So I downloaded the 0.9 Unix executables, opened one of the binaries up in Emacs, and scrolled through it until I saw something that looked like an XPM file, then re-constructed the frames by hand with a keyboard macro.
BUT! It turns out that most systems' a.out formats intern strings, meaning if there were any duplicate lines -- like, say, "2 m #FFFFFF c #FFCC99" from the color table, or even in a few cases the scan lines themselves -- subsequent occurrences were omitted from the file. So that was a problem with the BSD, Sun and HPUX binaries, and the OSF binaries were even more heavily compressed than that. But luckily the AIX and SGI binaries didn't intern strings in the data segment, so that made it easier.
Digging around inside a.out files and editing them directly with Emacs was actually my first job when I went to work for Lucid.
Anyway, I suspect that at this time, that anim-gif up there is the only extant copy of that animation.
Some fun usages when you do a reverse image search for the compass.
Alas, that search query expired. What was the original URL of the search?
Irritating. TinEye encouraged me to register (it's free!) so that my searches there would not be temporary. I misunderstood what they meant by "permanent URL links" which, for registered users "can be bookmarked or shared with friends." Apparently it means they stop working after some indeterminate length of time.
To reproduce what I meant: put "http://www.jwz.org/doc/about-compass-anim.gif" into tineye.
Those aren't meteorites. Until impact, they're meteors.