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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.
This scene came after the bit where Jobs signed The Beatles, and before he wrote the software that made the special effects in the original Star Wars trilogy possible.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
"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"
Bit of a bitch for the script writer when someone who was actually there at the time who was 50% of the partnership is still alive and can call bullshit. One wonders why they didn't bother asking Woz for information about what happened.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Does anyone want to see something historically accurate? Do you really want to see Jobs portrayed accurately?
It will never happen because the hero worship that is going to sell this movie would die if people knew the real Steve Jobs. You know the guy that stole other peoples ideas, actively suppressed worker wages, humiliated employees and random people he met, screwed over Steve Jobs, refused his own daughter for years, tore apart people's life work, disrespected other companies intellectual property and then started World War P.
You could fill this thread with war stories from the people that Steve Jobs burned. That's now what's going to sell this movie at this time, give it a few years and someone might be willing to do so, but until the idol worship tempers down it simply wont sell.
What a shit piece of film-making. Woz was the real hero behind Apple.
Hello,
The company Woz mentioned, Halted Specialties Company, is still around. Great source of electronics surplus and I have any fond memories of visits there over the past decades and wandering around their dusty shelves. I had no idea they were so instrumental in the founding of Apple Computer.
Regards
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
The original place was sold many, many years ago. The original location on Fair Oaks is under condos now.
Since when is Hollywood historically accurate? They added explosions in a Robin Hood movie and a hot air ballon in a movie about the three musketeers.
Yeah, Abraham Lincoln was a vampire hunter?!? I had no idea until I drank the Kool-Aid that is Hollywood's historical accuracy.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
... that 50 years from now the media will have deified Jobs and next generations will believe he was a much much larger than life superhero who bootstrapped the entire computer industry and singlehandedly created new innovative products and touched so many people on a deep and personal level through his enduring work. And the real heros, Woz and the hundreds of Apple engineers and designers, will remain a footnote in some obscure appendix in a seldom read computer book, if that.
Makes me sick, this cult of the Jobs personality and posthumous canonization of a glorified $20-profit salesman.
He also hold the record for Tetris on a Gameboy. When Nintendo Power magazine stopped accepting his high scores (he'd confirm by mailing in Polaroids of the screen), he started submitting his name spelled backwards.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Well they certainly were not kind to the Woz on looks in this movie. Go back and look at the Woz in the 70's not today. He was a good looking guy, arguably better looking then Jobs. Aston Kutcher does look like Jobs in some of the other pics, remarkably so. http://images.intomobile.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/steve_wozniak_steve_jobs11-660x465.jpg
The comment about Halted needs a little context. Halted (still in business) is an Electronics part store in the Silicon Valley (Sunnyvale off of Central Expressway & Lawerence for those who care..) I is the place you go when you need the odd-ball capacitor or resistor for your electronics project. Lots of good quality junk there.
Have you compiled your kernel today??
da man
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Hollywood inaccurate...... film at 11.
Wait, what?
But seriously, when did anyone expect historical accuracy from Hollywood. Another example that outraged many Brits
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
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.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
If Charlie Sheen had been cast as Jobs.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
... just wait until the climactic finale, when MegaJobs burns down Cupertino with his laserbeam eyes.
Without Woz, Jobs would have been that annoying fuck trying to sell you a cellphone at Radio Shack when you went in looking for a 10k resistor.
I hate how a lot of this history has been rewritten to make Jobs the genius and Woz just Jobs' partner. Woz built the early Apples, designing some components (like the floppy drive controller) from scratch, and Jobs just did the stuff that no self-respecting hardware guy would want to do, namely marketing and style.
I understand that English is a living language, but I object to changes arising merely from repeated errors.
The absolute values of their IQs are the same. The only difference is Jobs' IQ is expressed with a positive number.
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He also says he hopes it's entertaining.
I think I am not the only one, especially those of us who knew Steve Jobs, who will say this ... It'll be a very sad day if the movie that supposed to tell the story of Mr. Steve Jobs becomes a movie that is "entertaining".
Steve Jobs is never an "entertaining" kind of guy. In fact, Mr. Jobs can be the worst kind of SOB when he was in his mood.
I hope the movie producer can get more information from people who knew Steve Jobs and make a movie that is not just entertaining but instead, also give proper justice to Mr. Steve Jobs, the man.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Edison stole some ideas. The ideas weren't where the greatness was, though. Most people here have had several great ideas. How many of us have had any noticeable impact on the world?
Edison designed and hand built about a THOUSAND different lightbulb designs that didn't work before finding one that did work well. That effort made changed the world. Lots of people had ideas, Edison had determination and worked like crazy to turn an idea into an immensely useful product.
Similarly Jobs. I'll never buy an Apple prodict because I value freedom, but I'll give credit where credit is due. Xerox had decided not to pursue the GUI idea because it was unusable. Apple, led by Jobs, turned an unusable concept into a case study on usability.
I have plenty of good ideas. If a Jobs or Edison would come along and go through 1,200 protypes to turn my idea into a great, highly useful product we'd all be better off.
The comparison to Tesla is kind of silly because although Tesla did some good work, he was more like PT Barnum or Ripley - more hype than anything. A lot of his "inventions" were of the tinfoil hat variety, while Edison was producing working products for our day-to-day lives.
...read Andy Hertzfeld's site http://www.folklore.org/ which contains stories from the people who actually designed and built the Mac. Some of these stories went into the book "Revolution in the Valley" which you can still buy on Amazon.
And in an effort to prevent others from finding their own way to the top, from time to time the various organs of the Republic would engage in a disinformation campaign. Histories of successful people were reportedly distorted and 'enhanced,' to make their later success easier to understand, while at the same time ensuring that their efforts could not be easily duplicated by simply copying their behaviors & actions. It was trivial to enact: those who had achieved great wealth often enjoyed the ego-feeding exercise of believing that they were predestined to achieve it, that they were special; rather than the reality that at that age, they had run calculation after calculation, and were never sure of their own success.
The effects were plain to see -> a heavily romanced view of reality often lead to others internalizing the various actions of the characters seen on screen and in books; watchers would come away, thinking that if they were simply passionate enough about their chosen road to riches, then they could achieve all things; the prerequisites for achieving this success were sadly glossed over, and almost totally unreplicable. Just as 'Stand and Deliver' gave way to an entire generation of teachers who believed that they could change things by just caring a little more / fighting the system on behalf of their students, the point of these works was to activate the emotional centers of the brain, while deactivating the logical centers. Thus you ended up with what is essentially a headless army -> people willing to do something, but with no idea how to actually achieve it; they bought the kit for an airplane, which they believe will give them wondrous weekend holidays in Canada, but lack the instructions and know how to put it together.
It would be three centuries before anyone realized how damaging these efforts were, and an additional 150 years before they would be disbanded.
I am John Hurt.