wired-classes.zip contains copies of all the .class files from directories below this one. Netsape 3.0 will read the zip file in preference to all the individual class files, considerably speeding the download process (despite the fact that zip compression is disabled, only one connection needs to be established this way). The .class files are kept here so Netscape 2.02 (which had Java support in Win32 at least) can still access them. CODEBASE is set to the top-level directory, to keep Netscape happy when reading from the local disk - it gives a security violation if it tried to read a file (eg. the properties file) from a directory other than a subdirectory of CODEBASE.