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Early Apple Employees Talk Memories of Steve Jobs, Thoughts On New Movie
Nerval's Lobster writes "Daniel Kottke and Bill Fernandez had front-row seats to the birth of the personal computing industry, as well as the most valuable technology company in the world. Both served as employees of Apple Computer in its earliest days: Kottke working with the hardware, Fernandez developing the user interfaces. Both have some strong opinions about the new feature film Jobs, which dramatizes the personal and professional escapades of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and his more technically inclined partner, Steve Wozniak. Kottke consulted on early versions of the script, attended the movie's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in February, and is currently planning to see it again shortly after its release on August 16. Fernandez, on the other hand, hasn't seen it and doesn't intend to, because he considers it a work of fiction and thinks it will upset him. In this lengthy interview with Slashdot, both attempted to distinguish the facts and longstanding geek legends from the instances of pure creative license exercised by the filmmakers."
I think it will be funny and entertaining to see if they make him into the second coming. If nothing else it should be entertaining.
Metacritic and Rotten don't seem to be encouraging this movie.
"For a man whose singular vision alienated many – a point illustrated by Kutcher's straight-talking, temper-riddled reading of Jobs – those closest to him are barely given time to voice their concerns, let along develop as characters. Jobs's Apple co-founder, self-taught software whizz Steve "Woz" Wozniak (Josh Gad), already a vocal critic of the film, is presented as a mere backdrop. We learn little about Woz: where he came from, how he met Jobs, or what happened after he quit Apple, dissatisfied with the direction in which the company was heading."
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jan/28/sundance-festival-jobs-first-look-review
Heres a link to info about the film itself: Jobs (film).
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Oh, those were the days. We used to laugh, and then he would deny us stock options, and then we would go to a bar and drink, and then he would curse at us and fire us. Oh man, were those great times!
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
The one true geek character in the entire Apple saga. Well that is enough for me to not bother with it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Woz is the legend. Jobs was the PR machine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For balance here is comedian Bill Burr talking about Jobs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iGm4dl0Ys4
Bill Burr - Night of Too Many Stars 2012
Sounds like Daniel Kottke would be a great person to know. Let him roll about those days. Thanks!
Let's face it, most of us are scoffers. But moments before zero hour, it does not pay to take chances.
I sympathize with Bill Fernandez saying he won't see the movie.
It really amazes me how badly some people want history to read that Apple started the computer revolution. If there is any one group responsible for starting the home computing boom, it was the Homebrew Computer Club and the advent of the Altair . Please stop trying to make Apple history happen differently than it happened. If anything, Jobs and Gates were douc^H^H businessmen and acted as such trying to screw everyone else over in order to gain wealth and power.
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the man is more of a pop culture consumer electronics icon than he ever was a tech mogul
Well put. Non-techies go "ooh, ahh" because the end products are what they see. Meanwhile, how many people have heard of Nyquist, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Shannon, Kilby, Noyce and all the other tech pioneers and inventors who made this stuff possible. Money? Sure, but there are others with more. Nor is Jobs even colorful enough to be interesting, like Howard Hughes. Please stop, this is getting worse than the 24x7 coverage of the OJ trial.
Woz gave St Jobs pancreatic cancer by spiking his yoghurt with polonium.[*]
[*] Payback for the breakout ripoff of 1976. Just you wait, it'll come out after Woz is dead. OK, I'm wrong about the polonium being the mechanism, that's just not correct. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
it's not "pure creative license," it's revisionist history.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
He's already been reincarnated as a celestial warrior-philosopher.
http://www.dmc.tv/pages/en/Where-is-Steve-Jobs/20120822-The-Hereafter-News:Steve-Jobs-where-is-he-now-Part-1.html
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I'll have to second that. Folklore.org has some awesome stories from the rank and file at Apple during the birth of the Mac. I love the story about the engineer working all night on code for the Mac only to realize the Apple II he was working on did not have a drive controller in it to save his work. The solution to the problem was awesome.
If you like this sort of thing, and want to get the story from insiders, check it out.
People don't want "the real story" of Apple or even of Jobs.
They don't care about Woz's tech wizardry making Apple computers what they were or the other people (or institutions, *cough*PARC*cough*) that made Apple what it is.
They want a story about a hero, a guy who through sheer force of personality made an iconic computer company and then came back and "saved it" and made it even better than it was, creating the iPhone, etc.
A story about a narcissist who serially manipulated people, refused to support his pregnant girlfriend, and relied on the achievements of others to promote himself and his company and created an image as the guy who was responsible for all of it isn't what people want in a story.
(You could also take a Chomesky-esque view, and say that this is what the corporate power structure wants -- people to believe that CEOs are singular geniuses, alone responsible for a company's success...)
Hired in the summer of 1979 and working in the Bandley Iii bullpen... Woz's was always what the company was all about... The color production trick, the state machine trick, the integer basic, and the playful hard-working attitude made my time at apple a joy. Jobs was a prick who for example told Wendell sanders where exactly on the motherboard to put the ill fated and single sourced national semiconductor clock chip and denied a friend who now works at oracle the PRE iPod stock option that jobs personally promised earlier "you should have reminded me". Jobs, what a dick
Sure, they should make a movie about Tesla, but that doesn't change the fact that a movie about Jobs is worthwhile. It just needs to be an accurate representation of Jobs.
I hate to break it to you, but without Woz it is highly likely that nobody would even have heard of Jobs.
And without Jobs it's pretty unlikely most of us would have heard of Woz. It was a partnership and while it lasted a pretty remarkable one. Woz was a technical genius and Jobs was a sales/design genius. You need both to be successful, especially in a startup.
Well put. Non-techies go "ooh, ahh" because the end products are what they see. Meanwhile, how many people have heard of Nyquist, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Shannon, Kilby, Noyce and all the other tech pioneers and inventors who made this stuff possible. Money? Sure, but there are others with more. Nor is Jobs even colorful enough to be interesting, like Howard Hughes. Please stop, this is getting worse than the 24x7 coverage of the OJ trial.
Three of these people on your list invented the transistor. Fine. What can I do with a transistor? 99.99% of the population couldn't do _anything_ with it. Somebody has to take an invention and find a use for it. Without that person, the invention is worthless.
Well put. Non-techies go "ooh, ahh" because the end products are what they see. Meanwhile, how many people have heard of Nyquist, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Shannon, Kilby, Noyce and all the other tech pioneers and inventors who made this stuff possible. Money? Sure, but there are others with more. Nor is Jobs even colorful enough to be interesting, like Howard Hughes. Please stop, this is getting worse than the 24x7 coverage of the OJ trial.
Agreed. If they want a modern day Howard Hughes, I'd vote for Sir Richard Branson. Heck, even they had/have a passion for flight and would probably make for a better biopic at the end of the day. Jobs, was all about Jobs.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
I was a low three-digit employee (engineer). I met jobs and knew all the players including Dan Kottke.. Dan was the most modest and happy early-timer I knew at Apple. Andy H. was happy but he was always baked so it was hard to tell. I didn't know until years later that Dan was employee twelve from the garage days, he was that self-effacing.
Admission after thirty years: I took the diagonal cutter with the gumby green handle from Woz's office and never returned it. I still have it. Who knows what role it played in building the earliest apples. I guess I should send it back to him with an apology. Nah, he would track me down and prank me.
Far more people saw the transistor and knew you could make a radio out of it than saw the Schroedinger equation and knew you could make a transistor out of it.
According to the reviews I've read the movie isn't very good. It's an amateurish portrayal where they never really delve all that deeply into Jobs' life. They want to glorify Jobs as an incredibly driven innovator, but while trying to humanize him manage to make him quite an unlikeable character. Aston Kutcher is as bad as everyone expected him to be; he's over-the-top and none of it feels authentic. It's like he's ticking off a checklist of tics, expressions and reactions.
Apparently, the writer of The Social Network is working on his own portrayal of Jobs. The expectations are that it will be a far better movie.
the way that mr. fernandez comes across in the interview, it sounds like there is a single definitive history that only he knows about and resistant to share. it's not like movies are used as definitive pieces of history, it's essentially folklore at best.
Does this movie even mention Lisa? Or the Apple Lisa?
First Kutchner punks Charlie Sheen, now this. fookin' hipsters with their whitewash hipster movie can fook right off.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You never know .... but from everything I've read about the man, I don't think his ordering Apple to end donations to those programs was necessarily something he did out of hatred?
Most companies do this primarily for the sake of getting tax credits and publicity. Considering there's little record of Jobs making donations to charities on even a personal level, I'd say it's as likely as anything he simply found it distasteful to donate non-anonymously?
When you have the type of income he had, it becomes a disadvantage not to give to charities, really. You have to find ways to reduce taxable income, sometimes, or at least you come out ahead by maximizing the tax write-offs possible by doing so.
So, is this a Slashdot article about a Slashdot article? News must be slow today.
- I stole your sig.
While I realize it's not specifically what you're talking about (a fictionalized movie), there have been several documentaries about Tesla on PBS, and there was a recent documentary, "Silicon Valley", that was about Fairchild Semiconductor.
Jobs was successful. Others were bitter. That is the lesson I took away from my years at Apple in the early days. I am not so sure that Jobs was brilliant as the competitors were morons. Gates was brilliant at MS in the early days, as are a very few other pioneers in the PC industry. May to most were just average engineers, or hucksters, who fell into something and confused luck with skill. None had a bit of management skills, and used force of personality and brute ego as their primary management tool. I thought Mike Markula, one of Apple's three founders, was one of the better people in the industry, and I credit him with a large part of Apple's success. I left HP for Apple because the clowns there could not see the reality of the world. If Bill Hewlett and David Packard were still running operations, HP would have been Apple. But, the MBAs ran things at HP then. IBM wasn't much better, but did get in when there was money. DEC and DG were the worst. Jobs surrounded himself with the best people I have ever worked with then and since. In every area of the company. Not sure how much was Steve, how much was everyone else, as I was not privy to most of the big thinking. Thank Markula maybe. Not Scully, that is for sure.
Would Steve Jobs please come back to life so they'll stop eulogizing him. I can't believe they made a movie about him. I haven't seen any about Tesla. He was a good product design guy and made some money. 'nuf said. He's dead. Who cares?
Well, you obviously care about it more than about Tesla movies - else you A) wouldn't have felt the need to post, and B) you would have known that there already is a movie about Tesla made in 1980. Not to mention the two that are in pre-production, nor the major role he plays in The Prestige.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
I refuse to pay $10/ticket to watch a two-hour-long commercial for Apple.