Lisp hacker, early Netscape developer, and nightclub owner Jamie Zawinski, a.k.a. jwz, is a member of the select group of hackers who are as well known by their three-letter initials as by their full names.

Zawinski started working as a programmer as a teenager when he was hired to hack Lisp at a Carnegie Mellon artificial intelligence lab. After attending college just long enough to discover that he hated it, he worked in the Lisp and AI world for nearly a decade, getting a strange immersion in a fading hacker subculture when other programmers his age were growing up with microcomputers.

He worked at UC Berkeley for Peter Norvig, who has described him as “one of the of the best programmers I ever hired,” and later at Lucid, the Lisp company, where he ended up leading the development of Lucid Emacs, later renamed XEmacs, which eventually led to the great Emacs schism, one of the most famous open source forks.