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Steve Jobs Movie Clip Historically Inaccurate, Says Woz
Yesterday saw the release of a clip from the upcoming movie jOBS, a biopic about the life of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The clip shows Jobs, played by Ashton Kutcher, having a conversation with Steve Wozniak, played by Josh Gad, about how influential an operating system for a personal computer would be. The real Steve Wozniak commented on the clip, saying the situation it portrayed was "totally wrong." He said, "Personalities and where the ideas of computers affecting society did not come from Jobs. They inspired me and were widely spoken at the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve came back from Oregon and came to a club meeting and didn't start talking about this great social impact. His idea was to make a $20 PC board and sell it for $40 to help people at the club build the computer I'd given away. Steve came from selling surplus parts at HalTed he always saw a way to make a quick buck off my designs (this was the 5th time). The lofty talk came much further down the line." Wozniak was quick to add that he isn't making any judgment on the quality of the movie based on a single, 1-minute clip, and that the rest of the movie may or may not be more accurate. He also says he hopes it's entertaining.
My understanding is that Pirates of the Silicon Valley is fairly accurate. Does not paint Jobs in the best light.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
Ok, the Apple Mod Army will be here any minute now. Grab your ankles.
Aggrandizement of Jobs was probably the only option open to the screenwriters.
If the movie were written to show the real Jobs, they would have been sued into oblivion.
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Somebody gave me Steven Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution as a teen (thankfully missing the minefield of shitty books with the term "hacker" in their title) and it was amazing. Early days computer hobbyists, Paul Allen and Bill Gates writing BASIC for the Altair on a timeshare and dealing with the hobbyists who wanted to copy it instead of buy it, Ken and Roberta Williams and Sierra On-Line, and so much more.
Also loved the more recent Commodore: A Company on the Edge by Brian Bagnall. Just captivates the imagination to read about people hand-drawing their CPUs. There's an enthusiasm in the early computer industry that seems to have dampened over the years, as startups and corporations begin with the money in mind rather than the starry-eyed idealism and hobbyist tendencies that powered the first personal computer businesses.
Neither of these feature Ashton Kutcher, however, or even Steve Jobs to any great extent. But if your passion for computers is in their function rather than their form I highly recommend the above books.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
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I don't know if you are being sarcastic or not but the two are hardly the same.
Steve's idea was to sell something for $40 that the customer could build themselves for $20, a 100% markup. The idea the folks behind Raspberry Pi have is to order parts in a quantity of scale that allows them to build and sell you something you could not hope to put together yourself for that price.
That is not the same thing at all.
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Well, sorta...
It is still a movie and it dramatizes a lot of very simple Gates' and Jobs' actions. If you want a real history, I suggest going with documentary Triumph of the Nerds
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It's better, but it completely omits the major role that Commodore played at the time. To my knowledge, Commodore has never had any significant mention in any documentary or movie.
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Everything the Mac is, came from Apple engineers. Not Jobs.
At least one mac engineer has a strongly different view than you.
Not only did he know and love product engineering, it's all he really wanted to do. He told me once that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn't allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design. He was right there in the middle of it. All of it. As a team member, not as CEO. He quietly left his CEO hat by the door, and collaborated with us.I dislike the guy as much as anyone -- I believe that he is directly responsible for apple becoming exactly what their 1984 Mac commercial parodied and I think he was a giant prick for abandoning his daughter for the first two years of her life, making her mother live on welfare while apple was booming -- but I believe it is entirely possible for a person to have more than one side to their personality.
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