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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.
... 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.
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
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.