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Pirates of Silicon Valley
Pirates of Silicon Valley had a different goal. It was supposed to be entertainment and not a documentary. Parts of the movie were somewhat interesting. And it was kinda cool watching people act out what I'd read about and seen people talk about. It added a certain amount of realism watching a women try to prevent Jobs from getting in at Xerox. It was pretty cool having the whole story narrated by Woz's charachter.
They played some of the more standard predictable elements of the story up big time (Jobs and his family life is an overdone theme throughout, as is Gates screwed up lovelife- neither of these things would have been important on PBS, but the director thought they were important here).
Anyway, they don't talk about anything technical. And it makes ommissions and plays with timelines a bit to make things more entertaining. And its not a great movie, but it ain't bad for a made-for-TV production starring a washed up brat pack kid and an ER star. I'd suggest seeing it, but if you're interested in the story, watch Triumph of the Nerds.
Don't take my word for it, I know many of you tuned in. What did you think?
People also so conveniently forget that Apple PAID Xerox licensining fees to use the ideas that they came up with -- unlike Microsoft.
It made me sick that they made it seem that Gates and Allen invented/created Basic. They negelected to include Gates's internship at Digital where he stole a copy of their source.
I was quite disappointed in the movie. I saw 99% of it from watching the previews of it. I wasn't expecting a WHOLE lot, but I was expecting something more than 90 minutes of yawning. They placed too much emphasis on the past (pre-1990), and mentioned next to nothing on 1990 to present. The only time they mentioned something current was in the last 5 minutes of the movie. In all honesty, I thought the movie was going to go an extra hour. But no, 1990 to present was summed up in 5 minutes.
But then again, who am I to judge? I've only been following the story since 1981. I could have been doing something productive. If anyone missed the movie, I'll gladly give up the tape of it.
Just like Apple didn't invent the GUI, neither Apple nor Xerox invented the mouse.
Maybe I'm wrong, but didn't the colorful apple logo appear years after the unveiling at the computer faires? I thought I read that Jobs hated the idea of an apple split into colors.
Pretty good story, lots of personal background I would have done without, and I would have focused more on Woz, without whom Apple wouldn't exist. I mean, if you ask me Woz is synonymous with 'hacker god.'
Actually, a Xerox employee did invent the mouse. At least that is what I seem to remember from "Revenge of the Nerds v1.0" They actually interviewed the guy and showed the first mouse which had three wheels instead of a ball and was made of wood. The idea of a pointing device was not Xerox's, of course. There have been many experiments with joysticks before PARC started messing with the Alto computer (Xerox's PC), especially in aviation industry. None of the planes used an electronic steering scheme, but there were prototypes of crude joysticks (probably not even named at that point).
correct me if im wrong, but wasnt that prototype
Xerox computer with a gui called the Star or something along those lines?
--
ravenos
"why's it harder to subtract code than add it?"
I've read dozens and dozens of accounts of all
this stuff before and this seemed like a very
excellent summary, especially when given a 2
hour time limit.
Finally, the masses will understand that Gates
and Jobs are not computer geniuses -- they are
businessmen. And they copied and stole. But
that's capitalism. And it works. And its
all worth it.
Looking forward to the next movie about RMS
and Linus et al wiping the slate clean and
freeing us forever...
TNT always has a habit or showing their TNT-Original movies back to back many times in the same night. Also expect to see it shown a couple of times this week if they keep true to form. I guess since they made the movie they really want to give it a lot of exposure.
Richard Nixon dealt it a mortal wound, but it was dying slow. Bill Clinton and Bill Gates finished it off.
Not only that but a number of Xerox employees from PARC left to go work at Apple. The movie sort of alluded to that since the original lady who was opposing Jobs et al. going into the labs was later shown working at Apple. I would have to say that I think the idea the the PARC people were opposed to Apple visiting is sort of weird. They had been giving free tours a year earlier to anybody who wanted them...
Because most of his net worth is in Microsoft stock which doubled in that time period.
You don't get taxed until you SELL the stock.
And the proceeds from such a sale would only be taxed at 20% due to capital gains.
All these people should have their fortunes stripped from them and donated to the poor. To have a single individual worth $90 billion is completely sickening. They should defintely have to pay 95% taxes on that income after you make over $200k/year.
I could have sworn at the very end when he was leaning over the podium Jobs was played by himself. It was uncanny how much Wiley looked like him at that point.
...shrewd businessman.
Nicely trolled.
I'm just in it for the money, you think I have fun with this stuff? Are you telling me I'm in the wrong line of work? Damn
Given Jobs has the rep for being an ego-driven child, the movie was as 'fair' as it is gonna get.
Its always been the work of others that Jobs and Gates have used to get to their #1 spot.
Gates - The professor who sub-contracted BASIC to him, the QDOS deal.
Jobs - Rafkin, Woz, Ives.
And if Jobs wasn't good at taking credit, why is Pixar doing fine w/o him?
I think the big difference between jobs and gates is that jobs had vision. He knew what the market wanted and what consumers would buy. Gates just knew how to piggyback off of someone elses vision and then market it better. He's smart indeed, no one ever said he wasn't.
The Woz is a wizard.
(Few can call themselves wizards anymore. A wizard FYI is someone who is good with hardware AND software. And when I speak of hardware, I mean building the interconnect of logic gates, not plugging in PCI cards)
The change that I didn't like the most was the whole issue of IBM getting DOS. I always thought the story was that IBM went to Digital to make a deal, it didn't happen for one reason or another, so IBM then went to Microsoft and made a deal with them for basic and a OS. The movie shows them (Billy, Paul, and Frankenstein..uhh I mean Steve Ballmer) going to IBM to sell them DOS.
At least they did explain/show the issue of MicroSoft buying Qdos.
Overall not a bad movie, just a couple of nitpicks here and there about details. Of course a better name for the movie would have been A tale of two Buttheads....
hehe
Jobs and Gates, love em Or hate em, but HP and Xerox came out looking like fools for not seeing the future they had created.
Gates is a thief and a shark, who stole the GUI; they left out technical facts, and took liberty with the time line. They forget Job's payment for the GUI to Xerox PARC. Oh well, TV writer's always play hob with the facts to their own ends don't they?
Good makeup can make ya believe anything.
And if you keep saying "I built Apple" or "I created the Macintosh", people will believe you.
No matter how much The Woz or Jef Rafkin built Apple or created the Mac idea.
The C64 is the best-selling computer of all time.
Ken
What other kind of commenmts would you expect from a M$ flunky anyway...nuff said. They always come across with this insufferable attitude. Linux, I'll buy to spite pricks like this.
The idea that you are referring to is called communism. It has been tried over and over and has failed in almost all attempts.
The reason that America is a strong country today is due to the fact that Americans are greed-driven people who work like hell to gain as much money as possible. Taxing their earnings to the extent that they are not capable of becoming wealthy leaves them with nothing to strive for.
In this country, the poor are given the opportunity to advance if they are able to make some sort of contribution to society. If they are unable to advance, it probably means that they were not gifted with the level of intelligence or motivation that the wealthy have. This does not mean that they should be on the same economic level as those who are harder-working.
You probably would not have had the necessary technology to post your comment to this message board had this country been run by a communist government.
The desktop metaphor, and the pull-down menu chief among them. Xerox got Apple stock for letting Jobs in, and as the movie showed the management wanted them. The nerds didn't.
:P
Re: "they're all rich": Steve Jobs is not a salaried Apple employee. His money comes from Pixar. He's the interim CEO, and certainly has stock, but he doesn't get much from his current leadership of Apple.
The only thing that really got me PO'd about the movie was that they made it look like Windows 1.0 was shipping and preloaded everywhere. As if it caught on fast. It didn't. I loved the "Stack Overload" error they showed it having though
Also, at one point Gates mutters something about "I've got Multiplan running on 12 platforms..." which isn't true. Multiplan was developed for the Mac first. Multiplan was later renamed Excel.
Oh well. It was good entertainment.
http://mackido.com/History/IBMs_choice.html
According to the url above, it is rumored that the story of Gary Kildall's DR blowing off IBM is a story to save face, and that the _real reason_ IBM rejected DR was because of Gary's "personal life" which the conservative IBM thought inappropriate for them to be dealing with.
He was just an engineer. A true geek. I like how they made him out.
Woz, unlike Steve Jobs, is still on Apple's payroll. He teaches computers like the movie says, but he's also a paid design consultant for Apple.
I'm surprised he didn't ask for that chick's panties in the roller rink!
Pirates also glosses over the facts that (a) Douglas Englebart invented the mouse at Stanford Research Institute in 1965, (b) the idea of a GUI was conceived by Mac team member Jef Raskin while writing his 1967 thesis, "Quick-Draw Graphics System", and (c) the Macintosh team was already working on a GUI against Jobs' wishes prior to the PARC visit. The PARC tour merely served to open Jobs' eyes to the potential of the GUI and lead him to give his blessing to giving the Mac and Lisa a GUI.
Most of the GUI elements associated with a windowing environment, pull-down menus, drag and drop file manipulation, a desktop metaphor with icons representing objects (instead of actions), windows which could be moved or resized using only the mouse, all were developed at Apple. For more info on the history of GUI development at Apple, take a look at these letters which appeared on the Semper.Fi mailing list a few years ago from some of the key players:
Did Woz keep all his Apple stock after he left the company? Or did he have to give it all up when he left the company? I hear stories that says he is either a billionair (like Jobs), or that his only income is from his teaching job.
And did he really finally get his college degree?
That exact quote is in Gates' book "The Road Ahead".
You're kidding about SJ, right? Yeah, he's mellowed a lot in the past decade - 15 years, but I thought his foibles were underdone if anything. Having worked for one of Steve's companies (NeXT), I certainly heard horror stories... And while I don't know if LSD is still Steve's poison, I do know at least one person who got stoned with him at NeXT (some years ago, now)...
Here's a link to a decent article explaining the Apple/Xerox relationship...
http://www.mackido.com/Interface/u i_history.html
I didn't think it was actually all that great. I mean, it just seemed like a complete melodrama to me. It looked like the goal of the show was to make practically everyone look bad. As one of my conspiracy theorist friends said, it was the established media making a film about the new upstarts.
Actually, I do recall seeing Windows 1.0 around the same
time as when the Mac came out, though I do think it was
about a year after the Mac. But it was totally lame, supporting
only tiled windows, and was unusably slow. At the time, "windows",
in the generic sense, was the big buzzword, with Desqview,
GEM, and IBM's TopView (a bigger embarrassment than
Windows) all competing.
>Oh yes, they also left out the section where >Linux emerges from the shadows, and attains total >world domination 8)
;)
Hahaha... yea, maybe by then Linux will be able to copy and paste properly between apps? Hehe....
I whiney little fuck that lies to everyone and steals from everyone. Someone who saw the opportunity for a windfall and kicked the poor suckers in the kidneys who had been carefully watching and shaking the tree before he got there.
I thought it was quite lame that they had him say he was "thinking of leaving Harvard" when the truth is he got "invited" to leave. Gates isn't a drop-out, he's a flunk-out.
Actually, BYTE Magazine had an article about Microsoft Windows in their December 1983. It is reposted here:
http://pla-netx.com/linebackn/guis/index.html
The movie neglected to mention that it was Jeff Raskin who prompted the whole trip to Xerox way before Jobs. Mr. Raskin was also the main force in the creation of the Mac interface, which had some unique and fundamental enhancements over the PARC half-ware.
They did catch one thing right on - Gates _looked_ like big brother on that screen in MacWorld when Steve came back in '97.
This movie was terribly sensationalized, but what TV docudrama isn't. Anyway, if Jobs was really that terrible to his friends, workers, and family I wonder if he even feels the slightest bit of remorse. I used to think the world of Apple. Now I admire Gates (loosly speaking ofcourse) and hope Jobs gets what ever he deserves. Gates may be shrewd but alteast he's still human. Jobs came off like satan incarnate as far as inter-personal communication is concerened.
PS: i also have a hard time beliving that Gates was a wild, fast-car driving, zanny, and out of control crazy guy like the movie tried to portray him to be. sorry, but i just can't see it.
Funny, I've always thought the same thing (word for word) about DOS and Windows fans. It's rare to find one with any ability to think rationally and/or independently. Anyone else remember how DOS freaks argued 10 years ago that graphical interfaces were evil? Ever notice how many of them prefer the win95 look+feel now? SHEEP!
Maybe it's not polite to say things like that, but my point is, you shouldn't judge large groups by the actions of a few idiots. There's always one in every crowd.
I've known many intelligent, technically inclined people who like Macs.
Personally, I prefer to use my Mac for things that have to be done NOW with no bull, like balancing my checkbook. Linux is good for other things. BeOS is a nice blend of the two, but it needs work...
(Do y'all honestly think mainstream PC magazines are less biased than Mac mags? HA!)
Regardless, drugs are a direct or indirect influence. The beginnings of the pc were during the hippie era. Hippie computer junkies. God what a beautiful combination.
Being a Hippie computer junkie myself (as so declared by the masses I am acquanted with), I can safely say some of the best code I've written has been created while stoned.
Come on. How do you REALLY think the cOlOrFuL iMac's were concieved anyway? And whats up with the 'trippy' 70's style commercial marketing?
.-------------------------------.
|Can't we all just smoke a bong?|
'-------------------------------'
Didn't this guy ever have hair? ;)
What's up with the cheap bald cap on that actor?
The computer graphics was "low budget" when Ballmer spoke directly at the camera in that "art gallery" scene.
Umm, NO.
Technically, the value of the dollar hasn't inflated enough for their wealth in dollar value to surpass Gates.
On the other hand, as a percentage of the US GNP, theirs was far higher. (GNP growth != inflation rate) The Heritage foundation found that Gates placed fifth overall behind Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Cornelius, and Astor.
Rockefeller's fortune, if adjusted for the size of the US economy now, would be roughly $190billion. Gate's briefly touched $100billion not too long ago before the stock market faded.
Since Gate's wealth has doubled roughly every year, in another year or 2, he will be well over $200 billion.
Furthermore, Gate's wealth is far more scalable compared to Oil, and he has built his wealth far faster than anyone else.
And lest you think Microsoft has peaked, don't forget all the other venture's Gates owns:
Teledesic: 288 very-low earth orbiting satellties delivering 64Megabits/sec to your home for less than $200/month.
Corbis: Owning the rights to the world's art in digital form.
MSNBC: eventually, it may be a real network
MSN: could they eventually beat Yahoo?
Comcast: setup boxes
WinCE: in every handheld
WebTV: for the dumbasses
Sega Dreamcast: paying Microsoft for each video game you buy.
There's just too many to mention. Microsoft is like a hydra with heads everywhere. They have thousands of millionaires at Microsoft who sit on the boards of many companies in the industry.
I just don't see an end to the gravy train anytime soon.
Be careful! If I learned one thing from that movie (well, I knew pretty much all of it already, but it's a good way to begin my little warning) it's NEVER SHOW BILL GATES ANYTHING! Keep your idea to yourself and good luck.
Funny you should talk about Macs like that... Macs have the best hardware in a desktop-class computer bar none. Facts are facts. The PC architecture is outdated, patched, duct taped, bailing wired junk.
:)
On the other hand, the MacOS could use a lot of help.
...but too short and incomplete.
Did Steve Jobs ever find his biological parents?
Who are the pirates of today?
Is this movie teaching our kids that it is ok to steal/copy/cheat/lie?
It's sad to see Jobs go corporate and the story about his daughter Lisa was surprising. Gates reminds me of a young Mr. Burns (The Simpsons). It really sad how thousands of people want to be Jobs and Gates.
Weren't the 6502's used by the Apple ][ made by MOSFET? I didn't think they used Motorolla CPU's until the 68000 for the Macintosh.
I thought the scene where Steve Jobs ignores Bill Gates at the computer show was a little inaccurate. In fact, Apple licenced Microsoft's BASIC early on, a fact which the movie skipped over entirely.
Yea, the movie was somewhat interesting. BUT, talk about inaccurate and over sensationalized. Even the part about Gates going to IBM was wrong. They ended up coming to him. I really didn't find it that pleasurable of a movie. Where's the Linux movie? It could even be similar to the Tucker movie where the big 3 wanted to squash him out. The only big difference is that we actually have a product and it is actually gaining market share. So look at that a happy ending too!
I've read win and mac magazines (a mac user myself). Unlike MS, Apple doesn't shoot people who question management, and there is real criticism of Apple in mags like Macworld. I don't see Byte, Windows, etc. asking whether Win 2000 will survive against competitors, or publishing reviews showing NT to be a worse server than Linux (as MW did recently for the Mac - that is, they showed the Mac to be slow).
That's funny....
PC's have 3D video cards that push over 333 mtexels per second and the MAC has--- A crippled Rage128
PC architecture includes AGP, which, Apple has not implemented very well (if at all, can't think of a PowerPC w/agp).
PC's are sporting 550 Mhz processors, which are relatively cheap compared to Apple's high end G3's. (btw, that bytemark thing is bs).
PC's will soon come w/200 mhz fsb's, I think the Macs will lag for a while.
USB and firewire will do away w/serial ports and maybe printer ports, ISA is history.
So what if you invented it?? It works here, and it works better. Macs are overpriced.
That's the beauty of volume, it makes things cheaper, and that in turn increases the volume even more. And of course competition helps, which apple does not allow in its camp.
Apple? Innovation? A company that's still using the same UI since 1984, when single tasking, black and white interface on 128k ram was standard? An UI that's been 'kludged' to support multiple applications. Have you ever tried to explain to someone who hasn't used a mac that even though they've closed the window and clicked on the desktop they're still running the application? Why a system-level menu contains application specific information (E.G., About PageMaker under the Apple menu, a context shift). The (not Mac specific) single versus double click? The great memory management? The list goes on and on. Apple itself has had boom times (excepting iMac) only when outside developers have provided an incentive to purchase Apple Hardware. VisiCalc spurred the Apple II. The Macintosh was an expensive piece of hardware that was selling very poorly until PageMaker came out. Even in the early '90s, the multimedia markets kept Apple alive despite upper management's best attempts to kill itself.
"That, I should add, is NOT what capitalism is about. Capitalism is about achieving through making a better product. Microsoft, in most cases, does not do this. "
While I don't love Microsoft, the cult-worship that follows OS is ridiculous. What you like is what you should use. If I like product Y and you like product X, that doesn't mean that I'm an idiot for not using product X, nor does it make you a moron for using it. Telling me about the great features that X has over Y is fine as long as you:
a- Know what features X has.
b- Don't insult me, abuse me, or condemn me for making my decision.
-Bill Gates only wants your money. Steve Jobs wants your soul.
Hey, is that from the 1930's movie "Freaks"?
Do you realize that your post is incomprehensible and you come off like a typical fuzzy headed communist?
Do you realize that your statements about classical mechanics and Calculus are wrong?
(or truisms. What does it mean to be "no new discoveries" but "only a sharper picture" Any new proofs or theorems will be discoveries)
Congratulations, you mocked and humiliated someone who's obviously very new to computing and technology, and interested in learning (and who isn't afraid to ask questions). By lying to this person, you've demonstrated that computer people are jerks, and that asking questions gives you the wrong answer. Furthermore, why are you assuming that this is an example of your stereotype of the "ignorant Mac user"? Do you think that this person would suddenly acquire computer skills if, say, they had just bought a Packard Bell?
Damn. Dicking this person around sure proves that you're cool, but unfortunately only marginally as cool as those people who whomped your ass in grade school. Please grow up and try to stop making the rest of us computer people look like elitist assholes, OK? Thanks.
If TNT doesn't, I'm sure some internet user will... I would do it myself if I had a video capture board and mpeg encoder.
Ummm, if you're going to bash - get your facts straight, pal.
>>PC's have 3D video cards that push over 333 mtexels per second and the MAC has--- A crippled Rage128>USB and firewire will do away w/serial ports and maybe printer ports, ISA is history.>So what if you invented it?? It works here, and it works better. Macs are overpricedChill out, man. I don't think anyone in this thread claimed Apple invented anything - BUT - all the "PnP" cards in the world won't change the fact that things Win95/95/NT people pee their pants over have been common things to Mac owners for close to a decade.
Ummm, if you're going to bash - get your facts straight, pal.
""PC's have 3D video cards that push over 333 mtexels per second and the MAC has--- A crippled Rage128""
Mac's have PCI slots, so you can stick whatever 3D (and 2d for that matter) card you want in it. The majority of the big ones all have Mac drivers.
""USB and firewire will do away w/serial ports and maybe printer ports, ISA is history.""
ISA?? What's that go to do with serial and parallel ports? And about UBS "eventually" replacing those ports - look behind every new Mac...because it's all USB (and FireWire on the non-iMac models)
""So what if you invented it?? It works here, and it works better. Macs are overpriced""
Chill out, man. I don't think anyone in this thread claimed Apple invented anything - BUT - all the "PnP" cards in the world won't change the fact that things Win95/95/NT people pee their pants over have been common things to Mac owners for close to a decade.
The pirating of Pirates of Silicon Valley, bit odd i wonder who will care (what with SW, Matrix, & AP2 being posted 5x a day).
Its VCD Quality (natch under VHS), not bad but definatly for those with Cable/aDSL. Oh and its a GOOD idea to subscribe to a real nntp server like newsguy.com, newscene.com, giganews.com, ect, ect.
That "original lady" mind you was Adel Goldberg! They even got someone to look like her. I was royally pissed off in the credits when they only said "Xerox project leader."
I think a movie with PARC would be great... their struggle, Xerox just not understanding it, her anger as Xerox just gave everything to Apple.
I'm unsure if they meant the guy to be Alan Kay, but that would be also cool.
As a footnote, the actress they got for her was a real babe. If Goldberg looked like that and I was around then, I'd ask to marry her.
You're right about the mouse thing. Doug Engelbart got his BS at Oregon State University (I'm an alumni), and then used his fine education to invent the mouse at SRI shortly afterwards. Check this out:
:')
http://www.bootstrap.org/dce-cv.htm#Honors
Philip Edelbrock
PS- Go Beavers!
1) How many users have MacOS X Server (at $500) on their desktop? I was refering to 8.x, which still has major issues with memory management. Old, Obsolete OS? I belive that was my point. 8.x, in my experience, still has issues with memory management. And I still have serious issues with the way that Mac handles multitasking in the UI. 8.6 is an improvement (with the app name on the menubar, more clearly alterting the user to the application that is active), but for an company that is supposed to be an innovator, they could develop a better method to represent running multiple applications.
2) Also, There is a slight difference between UI="User Interface" and the kernel, which is Mach. http://www.apple.com/macosx/server/shot1.html. If you're truly refering to NeXT, the source of the Mach kernel that OSX is using, then you'd say that "I'd hardly consider NeXTStep a kludge." Mach is not a UI any more than the Linux kernel is.
3) Once again, when Mach (not an Apple invention, btw) in OS X reaches the desktop, I'll compare it to other alternatives.
3. No, My long rant related to a: Apple Corp. (Just as evil as Microsoft if given the chance), and b: people who insist that the behavior of Apple is saintly, not people who use the Macintosh. I'd rather have 1 happy macintosh user than 5 unhappy Linux or Win* user. Whatever fits your need best.
4. Ouch. My soul? Belive me, son (or daughter), I'm not a Win95/NT/98/2k apologist. I have several issues with the Windows 9x interface, also (see the Find Files; see also Start... Shut Down; see the Start Menu in general).
And in case you're wondering, when I run linux, I don't run fvwm95 (I hope I don't need to explain to you what that is). As for what I use... I've used at least a handful Unix variants (Irix, Solaris, Linux, BSDI, etc), DOS, AppleDOS, Win3.x -> NT, Macintoshes (LCs and LC2s, to PowerMacs [soon upgraded to G3s]), and probably more hardware than I'd care to admit. And I stand by that quote. When did OS's become a religion?
Let me repeat:
I don't care if you use. If you like it, then more power to you. I know people who call me heathen for running Linux, people who call me heathen for running Win95, and people who call me heathen for running on x86 at all (I must admit, those G3's (hardware) is very impressive, $$$, but technicially nice). I deal with Macintoshes running 8.x daily in a heterogeneous environment.
And, by the way, it's hypocrisy. Netscape, at the very least, has a spell function if you're running 4.x. Try ispell in Linux.
Here's another quote.
"Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice"
-Barry Goldwater
Frankly, I am amazed at a few comments I've seen on this site about Bill Gates and his philanthropy. Yes, it has done some good, but its not from his heart; as much as it's calculated PR. Someone said 2K years ago, if you seek your reward on Earth, don't expect anything on the rebound upstairs (or wherever you end up).
If the coincidence isn't enough (about good press in the middle of a trial); what man who truly means good in acts of kindness calls New York press conferences to tell everyone how good he is. So all you M$ flunkies quit whining and go back to your hole in Redmond.
Thanks for the link. I was really amused at the way the review
described "tiled" windows as a feature. I guess the press's
love affair with MS has been a long one, although it looks like
it is finally beginning to sour.
If *nix is such a terrible thing whis OS X based on BSD?
Hear, hear!
- Another toking coder
If *nix is such a terrible thing why is OS X based on BSD?
This movie would have been entertaining to someone who hadn't studied the history of the microcomputer industry like I have. The movie did a very good job of getting minor almost irrelevant facts correct while at the same time appearantly fabricating the circumstances surrounding key events. One example that comes to mind is how Microsoft and IBM went into business with each other. The movie would have you believe that Gates knew ahead of time what big blue was up to and went down to Boca Raton to sell them his new operating system. The truth is that Gates didn't know anything about IBM's plans and in fact turned them away the first time they approached him, sending them down the coast to Digital Research. It was only after the deal there fell through and IBM went back to Microsoft that Gates decided he had an operating system for them. The movie did get the part about MS buying DOS from Tim Patterson right though. The scene where Jobs is going down to Parc to look at the Star and the Alto is more or less accurate, especially the part where one of the female execs didn't want him there. But what the movie didn't get right was why Jobs was there in the first place. His people dragged him down there to show him stuff they already knew about and in some cases had been working on already. They did this because Jobs had to believe it was HIS idea to use the stuff that parc had developed, otherwise he would work to destroy anything they created. Why? Because he's nuts. Xerox did not invent the mouse either by the way, it was invented by Doug Englebart at Carnegie Mellon in the 60's. But the area where the movie really went off the deep end is in its portrayal of Bill Gates. Gates is made out to look like Satan, which he's not. He's a shrewd businessman and a nut in his own greedy way. Gates bet on the Mac every bit as much as he did on the PC. The man always hedges his bets. Microsoft was developing mac software when Apple was finishing up on the hardware and operating system. Microsoft to my knowledge has always sold more copies of mac software than any other company. So making Gates out to be a Judas is stretching things. Windows is highly derived from the Mac interface wise, but seeing as how it too MS 6 years to get something that even came close with windows 3.0, you can't blame them for the fall of Apple. Besides, if MS hadn't "ported" the mac-os to the PC, someone else would have, and many companies did try. Remember geos? Gates even bet on Unix at one point with the creation of Xenix and the work that MS did that eventually found its way into Motif. Xenix eventually mutated into SCO unix which still exists today. I know its just a movie, but how many people out there will see it and think it is more accurate than it is?
If you ask me they underemphasized the acid. Jobs wasn't just some nerd who dropped acid once. It is well known that he was a total acid head. He treked to India in persuit of enlightenment. The guy was definately a bit tripped out.. Then again you need to be to start a computer company in your garage and take yourself seriously... and it worked.
The odd thing that strikes me is that Win 1-3.x don't have a lot in common with the Mac, other than being a GUI (a far inferior one). IMHO 95 was were they really starting 'stealing' (Start Button == Apple Menu)
Yes, they added a lot to the OS-GUI.. But they totally defined paint/drawing. Photoshop and the like are descendents of Mac Paint. Things like holding shift to create circle instead of an ellipse. I also think Macs had shift and control clicking for multiple selections first. Though I may be wrong on this one.
I love Linux as much as the next geek.. but a Torvalds movie? Blech. Jobs was a tripped out egomaniac hippy, Gates was an egomaniac-capitalist. Interesting characters. Torvalds? Torvalds is a hardcore geek-nerd type. Linux the movie:
Snow.
Finland.
More Snow.
Uh.. No
hi,
:-)
i've encoded the whole 2h movie into RealVideo format (72M)!! if anyone is willing to provide server space, i can upload it in the next few days for every one to see!!
this is a serious offer, i'm only posting as an AC to avoid legal problems..
- Mr.AC
>Yup. Say what you like about apple. they're
>bastards for what they've tried to do to Be.
Uh... what precisely has Apple ever tried to do to Be? The only thing you can say is that Apple's interest in providing assistance for the Mac port of BeOS lasted precisely as long as their interest in acquiring Be to get said operating system. Once they had a different solution and therefore no reason to further support the port, they withdrew support. This isn't good or evil, just an ordinary business decision. Even if Be pays for the assistance, that's N software engineers who are taken off Apple's own OS projects and assigned to support Be. Programming talent doesn't grow on trees, especially the kind that understands and works with hardware at a low level.
I just don't get where this idea that Apple is being extra nasty to Be comes from... they're providing Be the same level of support for OS ports which they provide to anyone, which is to say none at all. At least it's better now that the Darwin source is out there -- LinuxPPC is being improved by examining that source for information on how the hardware works.
>Absolutely! On technical merits, the Amiga
>squashed the Mac like a bug,
Depends on which technical merits you're talking about, and what timeframe.
OS fundamentals -- yes, Amiga memory allocation and multitasking was a lot better.
OS stability -- despite the better OS design, the Amiga's poor execution of that design lost in the early days. In the first couple years Amigas were absolutely infamous for guru'ing at the drop of a hat.
Interface -- Mac wins without a contest. Sorry, the original Amiga interface was butt ugly, and nowhere near as good as the Mac. Same goes for the Atari ST, which was at least better than the Amiga interface-wise (and I say that as a former ST owner). Apple put much more thought into their interface and tried very hard to make it clean, good looking, and uniform across applications. Amiga and ST were both far behind.
Hardware -- Amiga was better until '87. In 1987 Apple rolled out the Mac II, which put Macs into an entirely different category of machine (at the time, the Mac II was workstation class HW). If your criteria is how suitable the video system is for NTSC/PAL video, the Amiga was and is still superior, but that mattered only to a particular niche market. (Similarly, Apple pulled in a somewhat larger niche market by having much better OS facilities for DTP and bringing out the revolutionary LaserWriter.)
I'm not going to make an account, so let it post under its gay "Anonymous Coward" bit. I do have one question for you? If Apple paid licensing fees, then why did Xerox have a suit on copyright infringement against Apple thrown out in May of 1990? Just curious. :)
Yeah, they made Gates look like a reckless supersales men... I think the fact he sold IBM an OS that doesn't exists, applies to today.... he is selling everyone on an OS that he doesnt have.... :)
...stability, ease of use.... that is not his OS....
Oh yeah, fogot to mention.... Gates sure knew how to stroke Jobs ego..... (reckless super salesmen)....
I have to agree, after all didn't Wozniak work for them? If he worked for them then I can't see him in a tie and suit.... it was probably a lawyer or something..... :)
i wouldn't give them that much credit, really.
As i take it, Jobs and Gates lucked out. IBM didn't HAMMER them bastards like how Gates HAMMER the new comers such as Netscape.
the sequal of the TV-movie, by the way, will have one more character- Linus.
because the story is not thru, man. a Linus movie will come out when we are done with world domination.
--for you, Lili Marlene.--
Didn't hitler stereo type?
So lets stop the seperation of people, and the stereo types of what people think, based upon what product they use, and the few people you happended to be in contact with......
To bad they do not have the software to match.... I remember my friend complaing "bar none", because he had to use macs, and had to unplug them when they crashed because the keyboard would lock up.... He also complained a few times about trying to alter the file types, because some one at his work sent a file to them that was misnamed.... He also had trouble with crashing and network problems.... even the resident Mac genious had trouble with them....
ah, this is probably just upsetting, but facts are facts....
"The PC architecture is outdated, patched, duct taped, bailing wired junk. "
The PC is a hacker world.... Macs are for the more computer illiterate....
Thats russian communism.... psuedo communism, there is no such thing as true communism since its idea is based on the good will of man, to not unbalance power..... maybe some day when we work for computers, when computers run the government is when we will have true communism because then the computers can properly distribute resources.... and bring people together in a giant internet based community.... (sort of like today)
....but russian communism is like a government monopoly..... its run by humans, and humans have a natural problem with power.....
capitalism - An economical system in which the means production are distribution are mostly privately owned and operated for private profit.
communism - A social system characterized by the communal sharing of goods and services.
I have an old dictionary but as I see it, it fits both the discription of communism and capitalism.... more so it seems its communism under neath it all but capitalism as an outer shell....
I see it like this, its communism because everything goes back to the community... its capitalism because people are aloud to still make some profit (although I doubt we will ever see a distrubition become another MS)....
Competition? Nope, capitalism in this day in age is anti-competitive, look at microsoft, that is the end all be all to capitalism, the end result being a company cheating the competition, cheating the community, to keep itself a float in a virtual monopoly, no not a fully monopoly, because then the government would have hard evidence, instead they have a soft monopoly, so that they can easily manipulate the truth, to make them look like their a normal competitive company trying to make a buck, when they are really preditory, anti-comptitive, and doing their best to keep their users, keep their programmers trapped on their platform....
Why do you think their are a ton of lawsuits today? Because the law backs up anti-competitiveness.... lets see where is the competition in things like GLIDE, where is the competition for the best Nintendo64 platform, where is the competition in gasoline prices? Capitalism does not want competition because competition means work and work means money... so they will use the law, standards, broken compatibility, what ever they can to keep the competition, from being real competition....
Capitalism does not produce workers... it produces over paid lazy good for nothing but their own greed, rich people.... workers barely get enough to survive.... the guy or gal you see working hard away, trying to earn that money, probably has room mates or is living with their family..... most jobs these days, if they are not "management", they are dead ends.....
first, life's not fair. yes, it's trite, but it's also true.
No life it is fair, its balanced, its when you are greedy and want more then what is balanced, is when life is not fair.
remember, either directly or indirectly, those people worth billions of dollars have helped others actually have jobs so that they can put food on their tables.
and its those same guys who are getting more money then they should, then they deserve, sure they may be in charge of many people and things, but they are not those people, and they are not those things.
without those rich men (or others in their place), industrialization would have taken much longer to reach the point we're at today.
Actually most historians attribute that to war.
it's those profit-loving business men that have driven innovation (of technology in general, i don't care to start another "winblows sucks" or "linux rulez" thread).
depends on what you mean by "driven", it seems more like attract inovation, because those who inovate are looking for a way to make a living from it. But in these days, a business men would look for a way to steal inovation...
without the rich guys at the top, most of us wouldn't be doing what we're doing now, and wouldn't be making near as much money as we do.
Who is most of us? How much money do you make? How much money do you think "we" make?
knock the big guy's down, and they'll end up falling on us.
well I don't recall any one asking them to stand on our heads...
Smalltalk is more than a language, it has a GUI element too which is what was demoed. Also, IIRC, Apple did Squeak which is a SmallTalk version.
I think Steve Jobs comments that Gates responded to (in the movie of course :)) sets to what gates is refering to.... I think Jobs words were something like "we are better then you, our stuff is better", and then Gates responded "It doesn't matter!!" (The only time they show him yelling at Jobs :)).... means it doesn't matter how good you are or your stuff is.... I don't think it meant "well get better our stuff will get better"....
I *highly* recommend the article "Inventing the Lisa User Interface" by Rod Perkins, Dan Smith Keller and Frank Ludolph. It was supposed to be published a long time ago but it was held back because of the then Apple vs. MS look-and-feel lawsuit. The article appears in ACM "interactions..." Jan/Feb 1997 p40-53. It includes screenshots of the early UI designs and a timeline. It talks about influence of the PARC visit and the influence an IBM technical disclosure called PictureWorld had on the final Apple Desktop Interface. I remember seeing an earlier draft is on-line someplace.
Apple didn't implement a GUI first....
"Meanwhile, in Windows95 Microsoft blantantly copied things like the Trash, Folders (even started called them that instead of directories), and the Apple menu. Even worse, Win95 borrows _heavily_ from NeXT, so Bill screwed Jobs over twice. "
On the other hand BG did screw them over, but sadly enough it was Steve Jobs ego problems, that allowed BG to manipulate Steve Jobs into a position to be screwed over.
"In my mind, there is a clear difference between Jobs striking a deal with Xerox to get the Apple developers in there and get inspired, and Microsoft just taking without asking. "
Sadly enough Microsoft didn't take it with out asking, Jobs just handed it over, after Gates stroked his ego. "Look at the contract" (Bill Gates says in the movie)
I'm not trying to be the devils advocate, but the thing here is to learn about who Gates is, and to not have a big ego, you just leave yourself open to manipulation.
interest income is taxable, and I'm sure his interest tax could buy me a nice Formula 1 team or something
Its more like $ billion after the current tech stock decline.
At the last stockholder report, Bill had a billion
MS shares, making it easy to compute his MS
net worth. However since then he gave another
$5 billion to charity.
The C-64 is the best selling computer in terms of the total number of units sold; the iMac is the best-selling computer in terms of the rate at which they are sold.
Hehe, it's okay. i OWN one of those cards... and I am 13.
How you people try to defend Jobs (the underdog) and attack Gates. Steve Jobs is a dickhead,
Gates is just a shred businessman -- who has
given over $3billion in real money top charity
(not MS software this time), I might add.
Besides all these, you people keep focusing on how much Gates stole technology, but the fact of the matter is, no one in this world completely invents anything anymore. You stand upon the shoulders of the knowledge produced by those who came before you. You could say that Linus *STOLE* Unix from Minux or AT&T. The vast
majority of open-source software is simply cloned
from commercial apps. Whether or not Gates
wrote any code is moot, it's not illegal
to hire or buy software, and then resell it
and get rich. Do the CEOs of Redhat write any
software? No, but they sure have made a lot of $$$ off the backs of GPL programmers.
Everyone here seems to think that Gates lied, cheated, and stole his billions -- of course, no one could ever get rich honestly right?
The fact of the matter is, Gates is smart. There
have been industry giants before, from the mainframe era, the minicomputer era, the non-networked PC era. All of them got washed away by a sea change in the industry. Except Microsoft, which has fought every revolution and won. They
must be doing something right.
There are a lot of whining losers on this board, people who don't have the business savy, marketing savy, or ability to sell themselves or their software. As a result, someone will else will take their ideas and get rich on it.
You can say you don't care about money, or who's successful, and that all you want to do is have fun coding, but if that was the case, you wouldn't give a damn about Microsoft at all and you wouldn't complain so much.
I relish the day when the Linux hype gets crushed, and Microsoft pulls yet another coup. Then Linux will be reduced to the level of Mac zealotry with a bunch of people still holding onto an inferior platform.
Bill Gates Jr.
Woz is, interestingly, the only truly admirable person there. And from what I've heard, that's really true... very decent guy, very different from the usual sleaze (Jobs, Gates, Ballmer)
Perhaps the most perplexing part of the movie was that TNT played it at least three times in a row that I noticed.
It was fun to watch, although the only educational value was the fact that they stole it all from Xerox. Maybe the next time I take a comp-sci class I won't have such a hard time convincing the instructor that Apple didn't invent the GUI.
Seriously though it really made me want to dig around and find my old Xerox computers (Altair, is that right?).
In some of the scenes with both Apple and Microsoft it was realy hard to tell whether the commentary was coming from Balmer or Wozniak.
Too bad the show didn't really have any substance beyond two hours of whiny bickering brats. It's more frightening to think that these two are on top of the computer world for many people. Talk about role models.
chris
chris@pugrud.net
---
Too damn early. need coffee.
(badly paraphrasing)
(Jobs) "We're better than you, we've got a better product."
(Gates) "You just don't get it, do you, Jobs!?
Now that's comedy.
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
----------------- ------------ ---- --- - - - -
Your honor is perfectly understandishable.
This movie showed one scene with Woz helping some little kids. From what I remember of the PBS shows, that's what he does now; no megalomaniac-type personality set on world domination like Gates/Jobs. He made plenty of money, got out, and now does something meaningful, helping schools get computers or something like that.
RIP, Gary Kildall, 1942-1994.
I thought it was pretty accurate. Sure, there were some technical errors (the one I noticed was using a mid-80s Apple II screen at an early demo of the computer). However, the personalities were mostly accurate. They accurately portrayed Wozniak as the real brains behind Apple, and the one that came up with the Apple I and Apple II. They also correctly portrayed Jobs as the guy that made Apple lose its great market position by insisting on killing the Apple II line (leading to the resignation of Wozniak), in favor of the Lisa, Apple ///, and Macintosh (of which only the Mac has done decently).
It also did a good job showing Gates as always being two steps behind everything.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by grphxguru:
...PBS...anyway...I enjoyed it. Made HP look moronic.
They did portray Jobs as real Prick...wonder if he watched it? Hall did great with Gates, would've liked to see it more technical...but
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
If memory serves, the late show was an HBO original picture. It was made for HBO and then later aired on network TV. On HBO it was better.
LK
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
In the fall of 1997 M$ purchased 150 million dollars worth of non-voting apple stock. They also gave apple an "undisclosed sum" of money to make their legal problems with Apple go away.
Remember the scene in the movie where Jobs announces that the era of competition between Apple and MS is over? The part where Gates is on the big screen behind Jobs? That was when they made the announcement about the new partnership. This is also the deal that got MS office 98 for mac released before any new version for windows.
LK
Posted by punkmutha:
After watching "Triumph of the Nerds", I felt like , "Wow... I want to run out and make millions creating the next killer app or platform and take over the world!" I was psyched...
"Pirates..." gave me a slightly different take. I know some of it was Hollywoodized, but the shred of truth that existed there opened my eyes to the fact that Jobs and Gates are a couple of unethical scum-sucking amoral slimeballs who will screw people over with any opportunity to make a buck. Certainly Gates more than Jobs, but Job's egomaniacalism more than makes up more whatever honor he may possess. These are not the people I want to emulate...
Yeah, it was ok, it was *entertainment* not exactly reality. Funny in parts though. Any real hacker admires Steve Wozniak, of course. Did Apple invent the GUI? No, but they did market it, and bring it to the people. A.M. Hall was great as Gates, Ballmer is such a jackass, Jobs is, well, Jobs... no mention of NeXT or Pixar, of course. And, gee, Microsoft _owns_ part of Apple? So does every stockholder, right?
...end of transmission...
Oh, my favorite prop was the little rotating display thing that Jobs had for the Mac, where he pushed the red button and it turned 180 degrees. Can't you just see him pushing it 100 times for practice before he shows Gates and company?
Gotta get one of those for my next product launch!
...end of transmission...
I thing It could have used Jar Jar Binks. Maybe he could have played the guy that invented the ethernet.
Last one in jail is a fascist.
>I thought Macintosh had 5 to 10 years of being the only real GUI that was actually used.
The Amiga and the Atari ST both had GUIs in the mid-80's, and there were others (GEM?) as well. The Xerox Star was (I b'leeve) the first commercially available computer with a WIMP interface, although it sold very few machines just like the Lisa. And X Window was born in 1984. But yes, you are correct about a usable (if pretty lame) version of Microsoft Windows not being available until the 90's.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
>CP/M used a C> prompt...
Shouldn't it have been an A> prompt? The C> prompt only came to be because most hard drives were C, after two (A and B) floppy drives.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
One thing that caught my attention was the way that the Macintosh and Windows 1.0 were shown as competing seriously. Windows didn't really catch on until 3.0, right? I thought Macintosh had 5 to 10 years of being the only real GUI that was actually used. Windows was quite late to that market. But in the movie, they make it sound like Windows was a heavy competitor from day one.
It just makes it look, to a naieve viewer, that Macintosh has always been second best, when I don't think that was true for several years.
It is a well known fact that occasionally one hand of the TNT management tries to play up to the nerd population and then stops immediately when the other hand finds out what the first is trying to do. This can be shown quite clearly in TNTs dealing with Babylon 5, its occasional choice of movies and a situation like Pirates of Silicon Valley.
I think that the movie started as a documentary, in which the story would be told, and then got mangled into a docudrama and then further got mangled into a story that has a clear "Bill Gates Won" ending.
Sigh.
Methinks the actual history was far more interesting. The sad thing is the lukewarm reception this will get in feedback and numbers when they show it again will give TNT the impression that geeks are not a signifigent part of the viewing population and then it is a waste to give them anything that is catered to them.
Anyways, I did like the ending. Here's Steve B as President of MS, Gates as richest man in the world, Jobs running Apple (and leaving us with the impression that he's Gates' bitch).
And then we have Woz. He teaches kids how to use computers and funds a ballet.
I know who I think got the best deal out of the whole thing.
If you knew what you were talking about, you would have said MacAddict magazine. Many Mac users are currently very pissed at MacWorld because they have been doing unfiar tests and comparisons.(For instance when comparing servers they compared a Dual 500MHz P3 to a G3 400. They said that the Dual 500 was the best they could do to find a fair one, but then mocked Apple because it lost the performance contest.
SRI invented the mouse, hypertext, and a shit-load of stuff in the late 60s. Hell, they invented that magnetized ink on checks so my car payment goes through faster (sometimes not a good thing).
Anyway, like my asshole economics professor said years ago: it is better to be uninformed than misinformed.
_damnit_
It's my job to freeze you. -- Logan's Run
8 bit CP/M didn't have directories, though it had a notion of "user"--seting this number (4 bits? it's been a while) prevented files from other user numbers from appearing.
CPM/86 was running MS-DOS executables and could use MS-DOS format by sometime in '84 (maybe earlier), but directories appeared as file names, and couldn't be reached. CCP/M could multitask by that point, too.
>The C could have very well been a hard
:)
:) No directories in CP/M, and the drives were generally aftermarket hacks (though there was the superbrain, with 5/10/15 options to replace the second floppy).
>drive under CP/M, or it could have been a floppy
>drive.
Both are technically possible, but neither are likely
While it was physically possible to have a third floppy drive, it didn't happen very often. Come to think of it, I don't think I ever saw one.
I *did* have a 10M hard drive attached to an Osborne for development work in 1982. It wasn't all that useful
For the most part, though, if development work needed either the third floppy, or the hard drive, a microcomputer wasn't the right tool back then.
And on yet another hand, Xerox didn't come up with it all internally--some of it was based on Raskin's graduate work. Implementing his thesis work at Apple would hardly be stealing from Xeorox (unless he stole the code he'd written), even if Xeorox had been opposed.
Usable footnotes. I'd never seen them on a microcomputer before word 1.0.
:) It wasn't new, but implementing & selling it for a microcomputer was innovative.
BASIC. The early years
Combined with Bob, that gives you three innovations--unless you want to count tha damned paper clip in addition to Bob . . .
About a year ago, the WSJ was so amused at the cover letter for a resume from a photographer, explaining how suited his work was to their paper in particular, that they ran the sentence in the last paragraph on column four with a "not quite clear on the concept" label.
[hmm, for those not understanding this, the WSJ doesn't use photographs, but drawings. Though occasionally on page B1 now, the arrangement includes photographs of products.]
on alt.folklore.computers. The "who invented the mouse" thing got beaten to death. Apparently similar concepts arose independently from at least a couple of sources.
>They had no interest in doing DOS,
>since they had no OS experience
That's overstating it. Thd "DOS" of most 8 bit non-CP/M machines at the time wre extensions to Microsoft BASIC. They shipped three levels, "BASIC", "Extended BASIC", and "Disk BASIC." Typically, Extended BASIC was in ROM, and the remainder of Disk BASIC would be loaded in from disk by a bootstrap loader.
I recorded the whole thing on my Linux box. 240x180 6fps but deleted it, it was so depressing.
One look at that depiction of the way Steve treated his employees will make you never want to enter technology. Everyone agrees Steve was a nutcase in real life. He really made his employees work 48 hours at a time, especially as the Macintosh was pushed farther and farther behind schedule. He was obsessed with innane details that no-one would ever notice, to the point of completely scrapping a nearly finished project just to get the boot time 1 second faster. In comparison, we hear exactly the opposite about how Bill treated Microsoft employees in real life. More important is how competing with something as powerful as Microsoft can turn you into a complete looney.
Much like the Xerox deal, Microsoft several times managed to force Apple to hand over the code for parts of the MacOS. This was largely due to threats of discontinuing Macintosh support. In retrospect, Apple probably would have been better off calling their bluff.
sigs are a waste of space
I'm still trying to figure out why the heck they felt the need to air the movie three times, back to back.
I came in about half way through the movie and was on IRC so my attention to the movie was somewhat poor. I didn't know when it ended and another "instance" started so I, at first, thought they were doing something really screwy with bouncing back and forth between times. Ha.
But, hey, they showed it three times so I just paid better attention later and watched the whole thing.
Maybe TNT just knows us geeks too well. Knows we were all hacking or chatting and not paying much attention. We needed the movie three times before we really got it.
Tell me about it.. It was all buildbuildbuild.. Then 'The End'.. DoH!
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Yeppers, Bill went to 90 BILLION.. ;-O
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Why did they have to Hollywoodize the movie so much? Truth is stranger than fiction, and there are a lot of true stories which would have been far more entertaining to watch than the stuff they made up.
:-)
For example: Woz and Jobs deciding that if they couldn't think of a name for their company within an hour, they'd name it after this fruit they brought in for lunch. Or Jobs paying an advertising firm to come up with a distinctive logo... and getting the overdetailed (and short-lived) Newton-under-a-tree logo. Or IBM being all set to ink a deal to put CP/M on their PC's, which would have made Gary Kildall rich, except that he took that day to go out flying, and that one decision changed history and ruined Gary's life.
They obviously wanted this movie to be a creative take on the 'relationship' between Jobs and Gates. Viewed that way, it didn't work either; none of the characters in the movie got my sympathy, and I wasn't able to relate to any of them (thank goodness!). If the movie had put us into the mind of Jobs the tortured soul trying to change the world, or Gates the megalomaniac playing his enemies off each other, it would have worked so much better, but both of them came off as basket cases.
What *did* work, fortunately, was the way they capped both ends of the movie with the '1984' commercial. Showing the 'making of' the commercial was a stroke of genius, and pure fun.
One fun thing to look for: J. G. Herzler, "Martok" from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, as Ridley Scott in the opening sequence. It's good to see there's life after Star Trek.
Oh, by the way, someone on the set should have been paying attention: the pronunciation is "AL-tair", not "al-TAIR".
Good grief, even discounting the fourteen gazillion million Intel based machines...
The best selling computer has been the Commodore-64 for quite a long time, having sold something like 15-20 million of the buggers over the course of it's lifetime.
Well after watching it for the 2nd time, they played Weird Science.
:)
WarGames was fun, as long as you ignored some of the glaring technical merits of the film.
:)
Such as the fact that Broderick had about $10k of computer equipment in his bedroom, with no explanation of where he struck it rich.
True. I never had a harddrive on a CP/M machine.
But one would assume that a development company like Microsoft would have had access to a hard drive.
I don't know, I guess I was just throwing that out as a possibility. I wasn't paying close enough attention to the movie to see what kind of computer he was using.
Several people have commented that Gates sat in front of a computer with a C> prompt and somehow this was out of sequence.
:(), Osborne, Morrow, Kaypro, Northstar, etc. Microsoft and Gates were selling CP/M software... MS-BASIC, Macro-Assembler, I believe they even had a C compiler at the time.
CP/M used a C> prompt... CP/M was originally written for the Altair. And then later became the dominate OS on hardware from Cromemco(which was important in Gates career and not mentioned
I am not sure about the historical accuracy of the meeting with IBM. My understanding was that IBM approached Microsoft, not the other way around. This was after Kildall had blown them off when IBM asked to have CP/M ported.
As far as the theft from Xerox and whether it was theft or not. This was all covered in the court case back in 1994 or so when Apple sued Microsoft. Microsoft won the court case, and I believe one of the aspects was that since Apple did not originate the ideas they had no property rights to protect. Those rights belonged to Xerox who wasn't involved in the lawsuit. (as far as I remember)
I thought it was entertaining. Hall did a wonderful Gates impersonation!
But my favorite line in the whole film was when they were at the unveiling of the Mac and Ballmer turns to Gates and says "Since when did this stop becoming a business, and start becoming a religion?"
Yes, in the acid drop scene he was appearing to direct the winds.... possibly meant to be 'winds of change' and when he was at the beach house for the party ,throwing the frisbees out to everyone, he was making the motions of conducting as well... so it was as if the hallucination came to be. And heck, one could maybe even argue that it was at the beach house and there was a new tide coming in, but that's a little far fetched for me.
Regardless, the acid scene was prelude to a later scene.
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
Befor DOS 5 if you didnt have "prompt=$p$G" DOS would default to C>,A>,..etc. The prompt command makes it look lile "C:\"
And on CPM the floppy drive was called "C>". On DOS it was/is called "A>".(or is it A:>?...its been a LONG time since I have had to use a MS OS.)
I have to return some videotapes...
Anyone know where I might find the plans for the Altair? Or even some more data. It would be cool to make one, since there is no way in hell I would ever be able to get my hands on a real one. Arnt they based on the 8080? I have a few sitting around and I could also probbly get the rest of the old chips no prob.
I have to return some videotapes...
Even more importantly, after buying Pixar, Jobs poured fifty million dollars of his own money into it to make it what it is today. He certainly deserves credit for Pixar.
Professional Wild-Eyed Visionary
I thought the movie was going just fine and was pretty entertaining. Then about 5 minutes before it ended, it looked like the whole thing ran out of money and time. The last 4-5 minutes covered as much time as the previous two hours. I kind of wish they would've gone farther and bridged the gap between Jobs getting pissed ad Gates and eventually getting fired to the point where Jobs was rehired and became "buddies" with Gates. Other than that, I thought they did a respectable job on it (though it seemed more focused on Jobs than Gates.)
-jay
I didn't think it was bad. Needless to say it left something to be desired. It was entertaining to see everything you had only heard and read about put into a film. The movie definitely needed to be longer. They skipped over far too much. I wanted to see how Jobs was fired. The Amlio Years. The deal struck between IBM, Apple & Motorola. The failure of the Copland project. Apple's desiccation to buy Next.
I liked how Gates and Jobs were portrayed. It played both of them up to be the greedy bastards they are. The movie did a good job showing what a geeky little jerk Gates is. And tore down Jobs enough to bring forth the reality that he to is human and not the great oracle some believe him to be.
Maybe the sequel will be better.
"The difference between genius and stupid is that genius has its limits." -- Unknown
> wasn't part of any settlement (they were all
> thrown out of court)
I'd be interested to see you substantiate that.
One thing I can't stand is this: many people don't realize that around that time Apple had one or two quarters in each of which they lost over $700m. Anyone following the Apple story would know that $150m was not big money anyway.
Joshua Davis
I found it interesting how they portrayed real people in the film.
Jobs was a jerk. Gates was a Weasel. And Steve Balmer was a pervert.
Also the real reason for the Apple/ MS rivalvry
was because Jobs snubbed Gates once at a convention.
This Signature does Not Exist !! FNORD
OK, just to be short and to the point,
all along, Jobs acted like he hated
IBM and "big brother" and how they all
had to dress the same, and be perfect
employees. I don't know how true it is,
but in the movie, Jobs turned into a psycho
and ordered everyone around, and made them
all be the *same* by being different. They all
had to be pirates, just like IBMers all had to
be whatever it was that they were.
And BTW, if you're really looking for a good
view of Microsoft life, read Microserfs.
Bob. Okay, you win.
gg
gg
Dr.Whiz-Bang
Well, Paul Allen got out of MS before his dickness could mature fully... And he funds many startups, thus offering future generations opportunity, so I don't think he's that bad...
And sue me, Steve Ballmer cracks me up..
Just goes to show, what a little luck, a lot of nerve, and a penchant for criminal negligence will get you..
(And I'm _glad_ SJ took it in the ass as he did in this feature, he deserves all the shit that'll stick..)
The sequel will hopefully feature a Ballmer aside where he tells you exactly when Gates sold his soul.. (or did he even have one to sell?)
I think you give Allen too much credit. Keep in mind he invests in things like Ticketmaster and Cable Companies, two of the most hated institutions in the US (at least by Pearl Jam.)
;)
I agree.. I said he didn't have time to _fully_ develop his dickness, that doesn't mean some didn't get a chance to come out..
(and even IBM techs have been 5-day casual since at least 1995, when I was there.. Unless you're meeting with a customer...)
In 1986 I met a shy, studious, man named Bill in San Francisco (both he and I were down on business) and spent a pleasant evening in his company doing...um, whatever 2 nice young single professionals do together on off hours. In 1997, I filed into a hot, muggy, auditorium in Boston to hear another man speak, with whom I had had a short, but meaningful correspondence.
Whoever those people were trying to portray were not these two men. Nowhere did I see any evidence that either one of them was intelligent, charismatic, or charming beyond what we are told by the narrators. There was no defining point in which we see that Jobs could distort reality (I felt triumphant and almost personally complimented as I walked out of the auditorium) or that Gates could use his gamesmanship (awkward he was, yes, but he played that as a *strength* -- it connotes honesty) to achieve their goals. Instead we're given The Hippie Nerd and The Nebbish Nerd: Evil Steve, powerhungry and cruel, versus Luckless Bill, striking out with women and hanging out with the boys in between speeding, ogling strippers, and fooling with computers. Nowhere do we see that there is any other computer industry other than these two guys and the older mainframe companies they used as stepping stones, even the music seemed irrelevant (this takes place 1976-84, but the music was a potpourri of general "counterculture" standards--where is Dylan (Jobs's favorite), Pink Floyd (Gates's favorite), or the music from the US festivals? Or MTV techno-pop?). In this world, video games don't exist, no one ever got an Apple II under the Christmas tree, and Jobs and Woz weren't married. The gestation of Lisa seemed to take an eon, and Gates has the quietest rises to power ever-- first you see them toiling in a cheezy motel room and then -- poof! they're millionaires.
As my friend kept reassuring me, this won't be the last movie to come out of this. I certainly hope so.
teleny, friend of cats.
This is from Triumph of the Nerds, and I may be mutilating some of the details, but anyways:
In the early days of Apple, Jobs needed someone to fill a management position and knew exactly whom he wanted: John Sculley, then head of sales at Pepsi-Cola. So they meet.
Sculley is initially not thrilled about the idea. Give up a great position at a rock-solid, multinational company for some shaky startup? What is this guy, nuts? So Jobs looks him in the eye, and says:
"Do you want to go on selling sugar water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?"
And he had him!
Of course, Sculley ultimately kicked Jobs out of Apple, but that's another story...
Steve 'Nephtes' Freeland | Okay, so maybe I'm a tiny itty
"It doesn't matter" can also be construed as "It'll get better". More a warning against complacency. Apple continued to sit on it's laurels, laughing at Microsoft Windows. Now who has the highest market penetration (not that I LIKE it that way)?
Remember, just because something sucks NOW, doesn't mean it's always going to suck (or at least not as badly).
At least that's how I took it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Bill Gates (about the Apple guys): And these guys think IBM's the enemy! *SNICKER*
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
They also played a little with some facts. For example, Apple getting WIMP from Xerox PARC (the leading technology center for everyone but Xerox) was completely above-the-table, with stock gifts, etc.
It was kind of "okay" IMO. When it ended, I felt like there was still another hour of the show -- that's my big complaint, that it fell flat at the end.
And, frankly, I'm surprised those NECs were shipping with Windows 1.0, since my first taste of MS Windows (2.something) was that it was a horrible piece of wasted bits -- even Windows 3.whatever was a vast improvement.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
they sure didn't. that was SRI.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
interesting. i saw this on the news this morning and the top 5 were:
1: gates $90 billion
2: buffet $36 billion
3: allen $30 billion
sultan of brunei $30 billion
5: king fahd(sp?) $28 billion
ballmer wasn't mentioned.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
actually, from what i understand, the mouse was invented at SRI. in fact, i have a mousepad with a picture of it (it's a large wooden block with a single red button in the top right corner--so either it's for southpaws or the picture is backwards--and what i think is a sun serial connector at the end of it's cable) and a caption stating: "SRI International, Inventor of the Mouse".
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
first, life's not fair. yes, it's trite, but it's also true.
remember, either directly or indirectly, those people worth billions of dollars have helped others actually have jobs so that they can put food on their tables. without those rich men (or others in their place), industrialization would have taken much longer to reach the point we're at today. it's those profit-loving business men that have driven innovation (of technology in general, i don't care to start another "winblows sucks" or "linux rulez" thread). without the rich guys at the top, most of us wouldn't be doing what we're doing now, and wouldn't be making near as much money as we do. knock the big guy's down, and they'll end up falling on us.
"onward!" cried the copper man, little knowing brass corrupts...
Calvin Coolidge Movie Review: "the spirit is willing but the facts are weak"
I regard this movie as insight into the mental states of several of the parties involved. I don't regard it as historically accurate, but that's ok - I enjoyed "Hackers" (yeah yeah, flame on) for the same reason but I would giggle if anyone told me they'd seen accurate technical details there.
The one thing that came across so well was the overwhelming sense of "What was going through this guy's HEAD?"
Nothing worth doing is worth doing today.
MS's stock doubling = Bill Gates' fortune doubling.
Yup. Say what you like about apple. they're bastards for what they've tried to do to Be. Bsatards for what they're doing with the quicktime codecs. Bastards in general. But they know their stuff, and they *really* know what consumers want. Whereas everything Microsoft has ever got has been through back dealing and wars of attritious marketing.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Thankyou - I should have been more specific. The G3 issues with BeOS was what I was talking about. Apple is stifling Be using very MSy tactics, and it's going to hurt them. Good. There is justice.
Believe with me, my saplings.
And yes. The monitor displayed a standard dir
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
Yeah, CP/M had drive letters like DOS, and (if you weren't running ZCPR3 or something) you might very well see an A> or B> prompt under CP/M.
But it's very unlikely you would see a C> prompt. Upder CP/M the only way that would happen is if you had three floppy drives. Or a sense of humor.
But remember, this movie wasn't made for us. It was made for Them. They don't know the difference between a C> prompt and a paper tape, it's all just neat-looking props.
And of course we all know how unbiased the mainstream media is as well. More importantly, we all remember a time (very, very recently) when Linux had no mainstream articles to support it in the mainstream press. Yet somehow, despite the lack of attention from CMP, IDG, and ZD, hackers and programmers realized that there was something to this OS. If the mainstream media's approval is the only sign of a good OS then computing is in trouble indeed.
And finally, I've found that there are brainwashed users of every computer platform. There is no platform without is zealots who illegitimately attack every other OS. Well, maybe when BeOS users make the attack it's legitimate, I don't know the BeOS community well nor the OS at all, but every other OS fanbase I've seen has been this way.
those two didn't invent anything; they just bought , stole and made the deals. it is those deals that makes them geniuses.
Commodore failed largely due to the fact that they were horrible marketers, and couldn't get the advertising thing going.
A more honest portrayal would have shown the Apple II squared off against Commodore, with Commodore's PET losing out to the Apple II in the education world, but the
It looks like the movie focused on Jobs and Gates, simply because they are two names that people have read in the WSJ, Newsweek, etc... I personally found that Woz's character was completely underdeveloped, the same being true for a number of Gate's support characters.
Overall, not terrible entertainment, but I do have to wonder if there isn't a hidden agenda in the movie, as it portrays Jobs as a slave-driving, egocentric, slightly unhinged guy, and gates as a clever opportunist, who was justified in copying apples GUI design simply because Jobs got the idea from Xerox.... But maybe that's just the conspiricy buff in me
Oh yes, they also left out the section where Linux emerges from the shadows, and attains total world domination 8)
I don't dis Microsoft for being unoriginal.. I dis it for making crappy software. Regardless of what the $1M Xerox deal entailed, the fact of the matter is that Apple improved significantly on PARC's software, and has always continued (except recently, when it's just trying to survive) to innovate.
If Microsoft stole the MacOS and then proceeded to make it even better into a wonderful product, I would not be complaining. The problem is that they took a few ideas, then made a crappy product that they sell primarily through politics and market-manipulation.. NOT through being a better product.
That, I should add, is NOT what capitalism is about. Capitalism is about achieving through making a better product. Microsoft, in most cases, does not do this.
The money Bill gives to charity is not the issue here. The issue is whether Microsoft is forwarding the cause of good software. It isn't.
I really liked the sinister music in the background whenever Gates was on screen, especially when he met Jobs at the Computer Faire. I was waiting for Gates to but in a hockey mask and whip out a chainsaw.
Steve Jobs was drinkin perrier, lemon perrir and back then there was no lemon perrrier
Kaoslord [quote goes here] define("slashdot purity","67.5");
The one thing I feared was that it would be purely Gates vs. Jobs. It's good to see that WOZ, at least, came off looking good. As someone who cut his teeth on an Apple ][+, I always looked up to WOZ as a real hero. Back in those days, Jobs was just the guy who seemed to handle the business stuff.
I do think they overplayed the threat that Windows posed to the Mac early on. Windows at that point was just a joke. It was there mainly so IBM could say "Yeah, our stuff can do that pretty graphics thing, too... but hey, who needs it to run 1-2-3?"
The movie made it seem that the introduction of Windows was the beginning of the end for Apple. The reality of mismanagement, bad marketing, and who knows what else that caused Apple to poop out is a much more complex story, and ill-suited to a movie of the week.
It would have required a miniseries (such as, say, Triumph of the Nerds) to tell the whole story... the downfall of IBM (including the OS/2 debacle), Apple's faultering, Microsoft finally getting it right (enough) in Windows 3.0.
I suspect they didn't go into the later 80's and early 90's because of a nostalgia factor. There was still this naive sense of wonder with computers back in those days. Nowadays, they are boring beige appliances that most people pound on during the day at work.
I got the biggest kick out of of seeing the old machines.
Gates was shown hacking up Basic on what looked a DEC PDP-8/E (the box with the orange/yellow front panel and lots of flat toggle switches.)
I also looked like they found an Alto. It was also a kick to see the Lisa interface again.
I'll swear I saw what looked like an Apple III on a desk.
I know I was at at least one Homebrew Computer club meeting where they were showing the Apple I, and I was at the First West Coast Computer Faire where the II was introduced. But in both cases, I remember the machines, not the people.
Well, the Jack Tramiel story could be a whole movie on its own... :-)
...)
(Atari -> Commodore, all the stupid marketing blunders in both companies, and the plethora of different machines that failed - the +/4, the A600, the CD-32, the 64C,
I read somewhere that Gates only plans to leave $1 million to each of his children. Everything else will be given to charities.
Any one know if this istrue???
Actually, if it was "C>", and not "C:\>", it probably wasn't a gaffe - it probably was supposed to be CP/M. ("Winchester Drives" for CP/M machines weren't extremely uncommon. Since Microsoft was biggest development tools vendor for CP/M, it's pretty likely that they would have a few!)
I had a MS Z80 board also, and it came with "Micro Soft CP/M for the Apple II". No DR brandname.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Just to clear up some of the confusion about Billy G's wealth...
There are several websites out there (too lazy to dig up a URL) that track an "estimated minute-to-minute value" of Bill's Worth.
His "personal" wealth has been hovering in the 120 billion dollar range lately. That number, to me, is just staggering, especially given that he's such an unscrupulous jerk. Of course, had I not the social inclinations that I have now, I may have ended up a sick sadistic nerd bent on world domination myself.
That 120 billion dollars probably "only" includes a few billion in liquid assets, and maybe 10 billion more in "other" investments. The rest is wholly his Microsoft holdings and options, which is why the number can fluctuate so much. It's to the point where if MS stock goes down a point, Billy can "lose" a billion dollars. Then it's up two points the next day, so he's "made" two billion dollars. It's like monopoly money, just like the rets of the stock market. It's not yours until you pull it out of the market and pay your 40% to the government. Then, it's liquid, but less volitile.
Bill's child is gonna be one seriously eligible bachelorette some day; she's an heiress the likes of which have not been seen since the days of the steel magnates!
-----
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
"And by the way, being an engineer at HP, I take exception to the movie's portrayal of an HP manager when Woz to get approved to sell the Apple I. We wouldn't be caught dead in a suit and tie, and no one I know has an actual office with a door. From engineer to division manager, we all have cubicles. "
You goof, this was 23 years ago. HP was hardcore into business machines, competing with the likes of IBM. And at that point in time, it WAS unthinkable that a "personal computer" (which meant a mainframe or MAYBE a giant "Mini-computer") would sell off the shelf to consumers. That was the beauty of the two Steves-- they saw the possibilities.
SlashSigTheorem: Humorous, Political, Critical, Constructive- If you have a
One major flaw in Pirates of Silicon Valley was certainly the wacky timeline they used and how it erroneously made it seem like Windows 1.0 was ready and released before the the release of the Macintosh in January 1984. According to what I know (based on Triumph of the Nerds and the books Insanely Great and The Journey Is The Reward), the first Mac had a least a four or five year lead on Windows during which time it was generally unchallenged in the GUI world. I'm not sure of the exact date of the first Windows but I think it was around '88/'89/'90, no? In the movie it shows Jobs & Co. confronting Gates following a Mac pre-release "pep rally" with NEC machines from Japan running (pirated & pre-release?) versions of the early Windows. Then in the "I got the loot, Steve!" scene it makes things look like Gates actually got the GUI idea out in the market (on a large scale) first, which is completely incorrect. I just hope that the general public, with their limited knowledge of personal computer history doesn't fall for the obvious (incorrect) conclusion here... that Windows beat the Mac out of the starting gate. That's a perversion of history.
bAz
I am pretty sure MS didn't invent their mice, they just manufacture them.
"A great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep." --Saul Belloe
I really liked it. It was nowhere near academy award type movie but it was entertaining. I was scared on how much of it was true. Jobs back then was a freak that would push push push and then blow up at any roadblock. Gates has always been that maniplative. Gates (this is what I have heard over and over again) did not win as much as he lost at pocker. He really like it but was not that good. The stories about how gates sold DOS to IBM without owning it was soo true. I think that gates and jobs need to partner up. They both freak out at work at anything. From people that I have talked to that used to work for the big M$, that gates walks into the meeting screaming and leaves screaming with nothing but screaming thoughtout the meeting. I think both of them have issues that they need to work through.. Jobs supposely is much calmer now than back in the 70/80s. I think the person that kept his head the best back then in the middle of all of this chaos was Woz.
Synopsis: It was entertaining.
Scott
Scott
C{E,F,O,T}O
sboss dot net
email: scott@sboss.net
Scott
janitor
sdn website family
email: scott at sboss dot net
I thought this was an entertaining movie, but I noticed at least one inaccuracy in the facts.
This being that the Xerox PARC people didn't invent the mouse as the movie seems to claim. It was actually invented by Doug Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute.
I thought the HP scene was interesting, since I work for HP. I laughed because the company has been kicking itself for years about that decision, but because at that time we were purely an instrument company, we saw no need for computers. Not quite the same level of mistake as Xerox's, but still a mistake.
That's my $0.02 worth.
I liked Pirates of Silicon Valley overall. It's an interesting story, even to those of us who grew up with the characters in the news, watching the whole thing as it really happened.
It probably could have been retitled "The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs"-- most of the interesting parts of the movie were the ones dealing with Apple, not Microsoft. In fact, often it seemed like the Bill Gates scenes were only thrown in because he's the richest man in the known universe, which should make him a sure draw for Nielsen ratings-- but they're rarely interesting scenes. In fact, during the negotiation with IBM, they have to step back and have Steve Ballmer's character tell people that "Hey, this is history! This is important!", but most of the scenes dealing with early Apple were interesting in their own right.
The treatments of historical events was played a bit fast and loose for the sake of the story-- but the character interaction seemed to be right with what we'd expect from these people, whom admittedly, most of us have never met. Steve Jobs comes across as the eccentric we expect. Woz is the technical genius who really doesn't have any clue that he's building 'tomorrow'. Bill Gates comes across as someone who _really_ doesn't like to lose. And the corporate bigwigs are dead-on. None of them believe there can be any money at all in personal computers.
If you're looking for a movie about the geek gadgets that evolved into what we now know as computers, this is not the movie for you. But if you want to get a glimpse into the minds of the people who changed the world, I think this is a good guess at that.
Of course, you should take this review with a grain of salt-- after all, I liked War Games, too...
-F
Gates: Porn King Looser who loves to gamble and behave like a 13 year old
Jobs: Psychotic Drug Crazed Power-hungry CEO of Apple who names his first line of computers after his illegitmate child who he ignores.
Woz: The only normal character there
-Z
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going.
I do believe Microsoft sold a Z80 CP/M board for the Apple ][ and it ran CP/M. (showing my age, I just turned 40 this past week...)
:).
Don't worry, you're not showing your age. I owned one of those cards, and I'm only just turning 22 next week
Wonko
While Xerox had the people with the skills to
build the future, their leaders lacked the ability to
foresee (at least at the level that mattered)
what they were holding onto. They obviously had no clue, even when informed by their own
employees, as to what it was they held in their hands. This allowed someone
like Jobs, who possessed this ability to comprehend, far
before it was obvious to the rest of the world,
just how important the technology being developed would become; to take that ball and run with it.
Gates and Jobs were actually visionaries, in their
own ways. Gates with not a lot of strokes of
genuine creativity, except where it came to
money, and Jobs, who had this great talent to say
"Hey, this is going to change the world", while
most everyone else sat back and laughed, in the
beginning. True
genius leads to all kinds of idiosyncrasies. Actually believing in something so strongly that
it becomes an obsession is usually what makes
real, large term change, in any industry or field.
To be able to handle the strain of pushing against a large tide of naysayers to make it
actually happen on such a large scale, something gives, usually. That's
my take on Jobs downfall, and the downfall of Apple.
Gates can be the richest man, financially speaking, in the world, but he's still that rather pathetic little guy, in my opinion, who
you felt sorry for at high school dances. There is
nothing charismatic about him, again, IMO, because
his zeal doesn't stem from much belief in something, as much as it does in the almighty buck. It's a tangible, noticeable difference.
And as I typed this, and was just going to enter
it, using Win98 (because it's early and I'm too
lazy to go upstairs to my other machine), just as
I was going to regale anyone bored enough to read
this; stack dump. Retype. Typical. Sorta said it
all to me this morning.
You have the richest man in the world, offering
subpar code to the misadventure of anyone using it, while amassing huge piles of dough from that
inferior stuff. You have your
ego-driven, self obsessed 'arteest', who gets
waylaid by the big bad wolf, out of his self
involvement and aggrandizing. A smoother system,
yet not many people know that fact, or give a rip.
That last scene, with the Giant Talking Head in
the background, while small Jobs smiles boyishly
at the camera, was a great ending. Talk about
imagery.
Who now, at this point in time, would we call
"visionary"? Who, now, is working at calling the
world round, when the rest of us know it's flat?
That's Jobs, back then. Gates, motivated on a
less intensely personal field than Jobs, was able to exploit Jobs' ego driven tunnel vision and
his eccentricities, and won the monetary war, if
not the code war. Woz may have been, and still is,
a talented, good hearted guy, but without Jobs
driven nature, would Apple have ever happened to
the extent it has? I think just about anyone who
becomes an icon of their generation is going to
be vilified and judged, and rightly so, sooner or later. After all the hype, people get tired of it, and
want some dose of reality, or possibly just dirt.
The TNT flick was rather typical of made-for movies. It was "ok", as long as you take it with
a hefty dose of salt. I wonder what kind of slant
TNT would have on a flick about Turner himself?
$90 billion as of Forbes this morning (see the msnbc article). I think its estimated in 2005 he will become a trillionaire.
The movie was well done, and within the limits of what can be accomplished in two hours, presented a more even-handed view of history than I expected.
For those who have not been close to the story of small computers for the last 25 years, yes, the Altair was the first to appear, and its basic complement of memory was 256 bytes.
The casting was very good, the characterizations of Gates and Jobs were very well done, and the story, having been based on the book from Freiberger and Swain, was accurate. Weighting factors might be argued, but the movie did an excellent job of showing the men behind MS and Apple, and their egos, frailties, and abusive ways.
While Apple may have dealt honestly with Xerox for what it got, they have attempted to rewrite history very heavily in their favor. I was using an Imsai 8080 in 1975, and before either the PC or the Mac appeared, had been very active with what we all referred to as personal computers. My own machine (by then a Z80) was roughly 2-3 times as fast as my first PC.
Apple didn't invent the personal computer. Neither Apple nor Microsoft invented very much, in fact, in the era shown in the film. Apple did a good job of developing Xerox technology into viable product, and both Apple and MS cloned event driven operating systems, with varying degrees of skill and success.
What impressed me most is that I found no significant errors in the film.
As to the handling of the personal lives of Gates and Jobs, I thought the film showed just enough to make clear that neither is a socially well adjusted individual.
Kudos to Turner for a film which does not fawn over the wealthy in either of these companies, nor take license to bash either beyond the realities of their respective histories.
--- Bill
Steve Jobs
Acid Tripping
The iMac
Coincidence? I think not.
:)
This is my sig. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I think they shoulda changed the ending a bit to something like this:
:P muhahahahah
Instead of ending it with "Bill gates is now the richest man alive...blah blah" they should have been like "and thats how it was until one day a new force came into being and that force brought about the end of windows..." and then they could put Linus' face up there on the big screen
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
-m
I was really disappointed from both a technical standpoint (obviously) and for the entertainment value. All the (loosely built-up) conflict in the movie was resolved not with plot elements but "ten years later, here's a snapshot of what happened." It was incredibly weak, even for a TV-movie.
I did think one of the "best" parts was in the last fight between Gates and Jobs. "Our product is better." "That doesn't matter." It sums up the events that happened through the whole movie and since then between Apple and the world.
I wish they had gone just two or three years more into the conflict. Wozniak leaving Apple was a big deal, and they did it in two seconds of screentime. Here was ALL the technical brain behind the startup of the company *leaving* (to start his own company, not mentioned).
Oh well.
I'd like to see the real folks take on the movie. I think that would be more interesting. I wonder what Steve Jobs thinks of the scene where his character drops acid with completely no plot justification.
-Chris
I guess I am just lucky, but "Triumph of the Nerds" is airing Wednesday on my local PBS station. Now I can see the real story and compare it to last night's dramatization.
-It writes, rates, creates, even telecommunicates. Costs less, does more the Commodore 64. Compute's Gazette
Naturally. The early years of Apple and MS are better documented, or at least, more people are willing to repeat the old rumours they've heard and/or made up.
More importantly, I believe director Martyn Burke used the time-frame in question to leave the door open for a sequel.
Union Yes! Member of Technical Workers' Local 101010
I liked the movie, though I wished it was longer. The story itself is much more rich than what they showed in two hours time. Remember Revenge of the Nerds? That documentary seemed to go on forever and it only covered 15-20 years of events excluding the gaps. Oh, and the personal life of silicon valley moguls was left out by cringely, not pbs. cringely is a nerd, hence he does not care about personal lives, just the technical stuff. pbs would show any documentary if it was any good.
A.M.Hall was acting very well I thought. Plus watching "The Breakfast Club" for the twentieth time on both TNT and TBS in the past 6 days helped. I think he is a pretty good actor and fits well into movies of this type, where it is more important to capture the physical look of a real life character. And I believe he will soon get a role in a hollywood movie thanks to the BG gig.
Steve Jobs should have played himself though. In the RevengeotNerds he was the only really guy who appeared to still think differently from everyone else's point of view, just like in the beginning. The rest of the characters calmed, lost their external enthusiasm, but not Jobs. I cannot say that I saw that on my TV yesterday. I don't think Noah W. was playing the real Steve Jobs. Or perhaps I simply do not know about Jobs' personal life as much as Noah has researched.
no flames.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
I thought Larry Ellison was Silllicon Valley's second billionaire? (how do you spell that?) And Bill Gates was worth $40 billion only last year (February 1998 -- some stupid bullsh*t PC journal). How could he have more than doubled it while still being in the 40% tax bracket? Anyone know?
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
Other repliers forgot to mention "The Breakfast Club." I think A.M.Hall had his best acting there. Upto now, of course.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
Even then, on the same hardware GEM was better (I still have a copy).
For what its worth, the GEM source code has been released under the GPL. Here it is.
Visual Basic: Notion was lifted from Apple's Hypercard and used as a club to prevent Apple from porting Hypercard to Windows. Hypercard was at the time arguably superior, although many people feel it has stagnated since then.
MS Word: Purchased from...somebody whose name I don't remember, written originally for the Mac, ported to x86 to form the core of Windows 1.0. Filched? Probably not. Good product? Arguable. Popular product? Of course...but there's lots of cockroaches too. Doesn't mean I like 'em.
Actimates Barney: Can you say Teddy Ruxpin? I knew you could.
Microsoft's sole decent product is their mouse. Well, I like Excel a whole lot too, mainly because that's what I'm familiar with. It would be nice if some clever person for one of the competing office suites did what Microsoft does so well...make it easy to transition TO their product. My investment in knowing how to make Excel do what I want it to do is hard to walk away from.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Incorrect. The settlement was for a suit that most people agree Apple would have won. Microsoft got caught with their hand in the Quicktime cookie jar. This had nothing whatsoever to do with Apple's "look and feel" lawsuit. Microsoft agreed to ship Office98 for the Mac, buy 150 million dollars of nonvoting stock, and make an undisclosed payment to Apple to avoid getting seriously hurt in the legal proceedings.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
How many users are using Word for DOS now? I'd argue that there's no meaningful connection between the two software packages.
Microsoft used their ill-gotten domination of the office market to force a superior product out of a different market space. You're treading very closely to Godwin's Law here, but I'll go ahead and point out that Robert Goddard was the pioneer of modern rocketry, not Dr. Von Braun. This is, however, a canard, as we're talking about Microsoft's dismal failure to innovate ANYTHING.
Thank you for your permission to have my opinion, I'll be glad to check with you in the future any time I have thoughts about any subject. Note that I don't need or want the market to reflect my tastes, but if the market wants my money, it must provide me with things that I want to buy.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
did anyone else think that it ended rather suddenly? it felt like they left a lot of the story untold. the whole movie felt kind of strange - especially when Steve Balmer started speaking to the camera as he was "brought out" of the IBM meeting into an art gallery. what was with that?!
there were a couple funny parts - i really liked balmers' "oh fortran! fortran!..."
This was a terrible movie. Poorly filmed, lousy dialog, and liberties were taken with the truth which teeter on the brink of libel.
Those of you who are interested in the history of personal computing should READ BOOKS. Or at least websites, if you prefer. You can learn nothing from watching Turner Network Television.
Can we recruit him into the linux world? Has this already happened?
The movie was decent. I think it was okay for a made-for-tv movie. However, for someone who has read all the inside-Apple non-fiction books, some info was lacking in some areas, and the choice of timeframe covered left a lot to be desired.
I suppose my main beef is that the millions of people whose only notion of Apple is that colorful iMac they see on TV now think the company is run by a acid-dropping CEO.
Apple has completely railroaded the BeOS on G3 platforms. Apple is Microsoft and worse. The only thing that keeps them from getting sued is the size of their user base. If they had as many users as MS they would be in court now.
What Fools These Mortals Be!
Very true. The C64 is the best selling single brand of computer ever released (the PC market may have way more users, but there are not 20 million Gateway or Dell PC's out). Commodore's earlier computers (PET to VIC20) almost dominated the market, and you might say that Commodore was the Microsoft of the late 70's-early 80's (on the basis of size only, although their marketing style left something to be desired). The C64 is also the longest living computer ever (there are still demogroups existing today).
_______
Scott Jones
Newscast Director / WKPT-TV 19
Game Show Fan / C64 Coder
FC Closer
and you dont think things have changed at hp since 1976???
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
Forbes puts out a couple of different lists each year. They have lists for all-out wealth (like unearned and born into) and working wealth. Interesting to see who are in the working wealth though.
1: gates $90b
2: buffett $36b
3: allen $30b
4: ballmer $19.5b
Interestingly Michael Dell is #6 at $16.5b
That's Forbes for ya....unorganized as ever.
Yep...saw it....still came into work today and used it :)
Of course, there were a few historical errors, e.g., Xerox did not invent the mouse. But Gates' characterization is quite good. I like his line when Gates, Allen, and Ballmer are at Harvard, on the phone with the Altair guy: "We have to let him know what he doesn't think he needs, and that we are the only people he can get it from." Seems to sum up Microsoft's business strategy.
The underlying story of the movie was that Gates and Jobs were sucessful because they understood what the personal computer was good for, whereas Big Business (IBM, HP, etc) did not. Which is probably fairly true.
Definately watchable, if you can get past Ballmer's very badly done bald cap.
No sig.
Too bad the show didn't really have any substance beyond two hours of whiny bickering brats
.sig :-)
Not to mention three of the four richest people on the planet http://www.forbes.com/tool/toolbox/bill new/
If the way they portrayed Ballmer was on, I just might have a shot....
BTW- I loved his aside when they were talking to IBM. Selling nothing seen as the start to world-sized fortunes, ain't America great.
(maybe I should tweak the
+&x
I thought they did a very good job of showing that the people who supposedly made the biggest impact in the micro-computer era, Jobs and Gates, weren't the guys who actually made anything. I loved the way they had Balmer's character sneering at the way Gates sold something he didn't have (DOS) to IBM. Woz actually created the Apple, but Steve didn't mind taking credit for it. In the same way that Paul seemed to be the technical driving force behind Microsoft.
I think this movie should help to finish scraping the boy genius inventor image off of Bill Gates that the has been polishing for so many years.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
There was one scene in the movie which came right after the IBM PC was released with DOS (early 1980's). "Gates" and "Ballmer" were talking about Apple while Gates is hunched over an IBM PC keyboard (before the invention of ergonomics, apparently).
In typical TV fashion, you can see a reverse-image of the green-screen monitor on Gates' face (Geez, man, turn down the brightness!).
I could SWEAR the prompt was C:\WINDOWS>
Am I nuts or did anyone else see this?
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
tied together with nominal dialoge to wrap around a loosely historical storyline about exaggerated characters.
But then again, what TV docudrama isn't like this?
I really want to know if the real Bill Gates said that line about 'successful people don't believe they can be beat'.
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
I found very interesting the level of depth put into Jobs' character versus the level of depth put into Gates' character. Steve came across looking (aside from an emotional artist-genius) three-dimensional than the two-dimensional (yet very lucky) Bill Gates. But I am left with some respect for Bill, and some awe at Steve.
The delicious irony that the movie pointed out was how Bill despised Big Blue/Big Brother, and went to the belly of the beast to slay it. (Although I think they put a little too much foresight and gave too much credit to the demands of Gates at the conference table.)
Just like the revelation that Darth Vader was Luke's father, Big Brother has taken off the mask, and it is none other than Bill himself! And our young Luke Skywalker (Jobs) performes a marriage of convenience with his mortal enemy to save his empire. Is there another Skywalker?
if you press down on the mouse wheel, it acts as the middle button. at least it does for me and my mouse type is IMPS/2. i haven't figured out how to get the wheel working, though, which is a shame as i like to read /. slumped bonelessly with one paw outstretched to the mouse. anyone have any success with implementing mwheelup and mwheeldn?
(i was going to make some comment about one handed web browsing, but felt that some people would take it the wrong way...)
dave "it's a *beer* in the other hand!" o
(no, not *that* daveo)
I think TNT's view of things was a good introduction to the history between the two (Jobs and Gates). I mainly grinned and nodded at most of the factual content (and picked up a few things that might be true, who's to know?). But to their real target, people like my father who just don't touch these silly computer things, it was well done. It shows just a bit of what has gone on behind it all, but keeps their interest wonderfully. After he's seen it, I might just be able to explain to my father just what the Open Source movement could mean in the whole picture.
You are so wrong and Communism is so wrong. That's not to say you're a Communist. But, as long as people called it a democracy YOU wouldn't realize your country was a becoming communist state. See what you think of this:
Mind you, I haven't cared much for popularized theory ever since I was a freshman in high school back when I stopped being an idiot thinking that if you knew the position and velocity of every particle you'd know the complete future of the universe. Quantum mechanics had little to do with it. QM was just the last straw to a bunch of other revelations. There are two parallels here: One is that we repeat the same developmental processes as our ancestors in knowledge as well as in physical featutes. There was a time when pure determinism was dominant. Look at how fetuses develop. They follow the steps of evolution from one to the next.
The other parallel is a lack of complete self awareness. Position and velocity are analogous to awareness provided by the sensory organs and awareness provided by emotions. In the old days the world was position and velocity. Calculus was still a baby even after it was published. Heck, it still is in the sense that most people never hear of it. Calculus is the maturation of knowledge started in the Renaissance. It encompasses everything, position, velocity, physical laws, relationships, and models. The same way there can be no new dicovery in Classical Mechanics, there can be no new discovery in Calculus. All developments only make it a sharper picture.
What's it all mean? The exclusion of reason from Communism is the same as the childhood of reason in the old days. I don't care how long a speech Marx could write or how accurate he was about how people behave. He made a fatal mistake in flouting reason just because most of the citizens could not reason as well as they could feel or sense.
Capitalist Russia had become a protectionist state and was strangling its citizens so that they could not learn, make a decent living, and so on (sound familiar) and thus could not reason well enough.
Of course, there was a revolution. Problem is the wrong side called a truce, then called the shots out to people too starved of any education to see past their emotions.
Marxist Socialism = theoretical Communism
Maoist Communism = real world proof of what actually happens (Mao was not a Communist, just a phony power monger in disguise. This really says it all.)
Well guess what? America is primed for self-destruction. America is not strong. Unless you only consider stock brokers and shareholders citizens. In this country the poor are given no opportunity at all. Show me a communist soup kitchen that encourages poor people to head to the library.
Show me a mission that would rather have you all books not just the Hymnal (obviously if you're poor you have no business expecting to read the "complex" dialogue of the Bible. Just wait for your pastor to explain it to you in poor people's dialect of English.)
Patents are being abused in a society that is no longer industrialist because it has discovered the roots of everything.
For example, Moog invented the synthesizer, which followed the concept that originally gave birth to the pipe organ which would not exist without the development of polyphony, which would not have existed if some one had not decided to change the "holy" notes.
We need only follow the work represented in all our resources to solve problems. The time for secrets is over. There's nothing to guard but the gate. Instead of a revolution we just need to ask questions, research, experiment for the sake of understanding principles since discovery is over, and publish our findings back into system. The Internet makes this possible, without a lot of bloodshed.
We can't have the Internet polluted by the likes of Gates who don't work hard at all. They just travel around giving the same speeches.
Americans aren't selfish. If only they were, they'd really know what they want and would go on peacefully on their own. You are right however that they are greedy. Greed represents the need to fill a void. It is a disease. Selfishness is healthy. It represents self-knowledge and self respect.
As for the technology, believe me science raged on in Communist Russia, they beat us in the space race remember. Sure public information technology like slashdot would not be available but that doesn't mean they didn't have it. Wake up, please.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
It's all in an earlier post on this thread.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
model. It's just that money isn't a value. It's just a medium of exchange. The competition is for quality. and you can't get quality without information.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
Do you realize that your post is incomprehensible and you come off like a typical fuzzy headed communist?
Hey, listen. I learned the damned English language from a TRS-80 BASIC programming book. BTW that's the first encounter I ever had with Microsoft. Apparently for undefined error messages the message would be the company's name. I don't know, were they trying to build up the public's tolerance of bugs?
I tend to place facts first then discuss them. I don't think in sentences. I think in terms of models. I sound like a fuzzy headed commie because I have to put up with untangling a ton of doublethink that I pick up from watching how everyone I'm in contact with behaves, pass that through my conceptions of the world, then write it. Clarity sometimes takes a back seat. The difference is commies depend totally on emotion like I said before, and any reason they do have they put it to the service of their emtions. I know how powerful rhetoric can be, so I try to be careful resulting in said fuzzy head commie syndrome.
Do you realize that your statements about classical mechanics and Calculus are wrong?
(or truisms. What does it mean to be "no new discoveries" but "only a sharper picture" Any new proofs or theorems will be discoveries)
I'm talking about systems of knowledge. What was the purpose of classical mechanics? To study motion and interaction between objects. Soon several concepts were developed. Force for example as something to explain and describe change. That doesn't count as a discovery. That's simply naming concepts that explain the observed results. The electromagnetic force is a discovery. The gravitational force is a discovery. I see a discovery not as something that is just new but something that cannot be deduced from talking simply about forces. Newton's laws again were discoveries.
What I mean when I say no new discoveries is that the framework for studying pure mechanics and the framework for studying calculus are complete. New dicoveries for making approximations will not reveal anything new about the framework it will just make it easier to use.
You can't explain special relativity in terms of forces. It's something totally different from classical mechanics. Relativistic mechanics will always be a combination of the two theories.
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
If you want to talk about real wealth, then Gates is a pauper. Consider JP Morgan, who together with about 4-5 other friends, bailed out the U.S. Gov't around the turn of the century with ~$60 million in gold (you might consider looking into just how much that was then). Or how about J.D. Rockefeller? He was worth more (by quite a bit) than all of the printed money in the U.S put together at his peak. These men were also capitalists on the scale that Gates could never attain (U.S. laws against monopolies were mostly crafted and put to their first large tests against these guys and their peers, not to mention the 16th amendment(woohoo income tax :) )). Look at their wealth in their day vs. Gates now and you will find that Gates just can't compare. Regardless, he is stinking rich. Though I don't think he'll get to $1 trillion. Even microsoft has to hit the ceiling eventually.
-Mike
Calling Gates's $90 billion "working wealth" is an insult to workers everywhere.
Another continuity problem: the photo shoot Gates does. "It's for the Wall Street Journal," his assistant says.
In fact, "Staff Photographer for the Wall Street Journal" is a *classic* no-op job title.
"Dada is the signboard of abstraction; advertising and business are also elements of poetry." -Tristan Tzara
There was no talk about the passion.
Well, maybe the apple employees fighting each other, but even that was weak.
But there was no positive idealism. That's alot of what drives, if not BillG and Jobs, then the employees and the hackers. And the head muckamucks who are successfull play off this.
I saw no fire burning in Wiley/Jobs's eyes when he was preaching to the masses.
The only time the term 'Insanely Great' was used, it was a throw-away line.
Anyone knows which station will broadcast Pirates of Silicon Valley in Canada? (or Mexico, or UK, or. ...)
- - -
It was fun to watch, although the only educational value was the fact that they stole it all from Xerox.
Well, not really. Not at all.
Apple hired some Xerox people like Jef Raskin and Bruce Horn. In fact, Jobs gave Xerox some Apple stock, a lot, in fact, for the exact purpose of bringing in Apple programmers to inspire them to go in new directions. From what I understand, Xerox was AWARE of what Jobs was doing. They just didn't care.
Additionally, the PARC stuff didn't have folders, or files being represented as icons. The original Xerox stuff had far more in common with X11 than Mac UI. Xerox turned left, Apple turned right, then Xerox started to veer a bit towards the right.
Meanwhile, in Windows95 Microsoft blantantly copied things like the Trash, Folders (even started called them that instead of directories), and the Apple menu. Even worse, Win95 borrows _heavily_ from NeXT, so Bill screwed Jobs over twice.
In my mind, there is a clear difference between Jobs striking a deal with Xerox to get the Apple developers in there and get inspired, and Microsoft just taking without asking.
BTW: There is a good article on this.
Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I seem to remeber VB being purchased from someone who was horrified to discover when VB 1.0 shipped that they had changed to Basic from Pascal...and don't forget "Microsoft Bob"!
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
I thought it was pretty good, but not terriffic.. for some reason, it reminded me vaguely of Late Shift, the made-for-tv movie about the late night talk show wars. Of course, that one was quite good.. ;)
Anthony Michael Hall may be washed up, but I dont think they coulda chosen a better Gates =D
Justin
"Short, tall, fat, skinny, from the highest king to the lowest man, everyone uses the potty." - Brak
Did anyone notice how there's a scene with Gates sitting in front of an IBM PC, with a C> prompt on it, and moving a highlight bar over some filenames, TWO SCENES BEFORE THEY GO TO IBM TO SELL THEM ON DOS, AND THREE SCENES BEFORE THEY BUY DOS FROM SEATLLE COMPUTER?
Numbers 1, 3, and 4 were Gates, Allen, and Ballmer.
Wow, they sure did make Steve Jobs look like a real prick. Then again, Jobs, Gates, Ellison, Ballmer all have reputations for being dicks. They're also all very rich. Is this a pettern? Haha I'm not sure - I've been a dick for years and I'm still broke.
Noah played Jobs very well - the obsessiveness, and the general flakiness.
Anthony had Gates' speech and physcial presence (slouching) down very well also.
This was a pretty good movie - it brought to the public the fact that both Microsoft and Apple stole from Xerox - a fact that escapes most people who think Apple invented the GUI.
I've heard Gates' fortune estimated between $90 - $110 billion. Considering that most of the world doesn't yet have computers, I wonder what the odds of Gates being the first ever trillionaire.
Any econ people out there care to comment?
Man is the only capable of blushing, and he is the only one that needs to. - Twain
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
There was a Star, an Alto and a Dandelion IIRC.
The fascinating thing about these, aside from the phenomenal bitmapped display, was the networking.
XNS, which still lives on in Novell's IPX/SPX (which TCP/IP still haven't completely killed) was a buttkicking network protocol for the time, and blew Appletalk way out of the water for larger enterprises.
The problem with XNS was that you had to string these little routers called "clearinghouses" around the building to make it all work.
That having been said, as recently as 1990 I was in a shop where 30 Xeroids were on contract and Xerox donated Xerox workstations for all of them because Xerox people adamantly refused to work on anything else. I was using Suns and VAXes at the time, and I understood why they felt that way.
I understand the omission but I was particularly disappointed that they introduced John Draper (Cap'n Crunch) in the early phone phreaking scenes but missed a sterling opportunity. As I recall, John wrote the FIRST word processor ever marketed for the IBM-PC. I seem to remember it was called Easy Writer.
I think John's story rates a movie of his own, but noting his word processor would have been an even better tip of the hat than the cereal box in "Sneakers".
On the phone phreaking front, I was waiting with bated breath to see if they would let on that there was apparently some shared circuitry between the blue boxes Woz and Jobs built and the Apple I. Oh well.
I did note with glee Woz' telephone joke line. I remember how amazingly popular those and the tape-broadcast phone "shows" and conference bridges were. If anyone has tapes of "Feedback", the "DeCreepo Broadcast System", and Woz' line, I bet a CD of them would sell as well as the Jerky Boys do today.
Stop me before I reminisce again...
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
I thought it was a GREAT! movie..I watched it
2 time last night..at 8 and 10pm. I never realized
what a prick steve jobs really was.. no wonder
apple has gone down the tubes. The movie was
quite inspirational though. I have always thought
of starting my own computer oriented business.
I did a lot of thinking last night about about
possible ideas. I've been thinking about this for
years, but could never come up with a totally
original and plausable idea. But last night it hit
me! Maybe it was the movie. Maybe it was just dumb
timing.. Either way, I liked it!
"Bill the revolution is starting without us!"
malice95
To tell the story in the 'entertaining' way that they wanted, they still could've been more accurate. Several of the scenarios were changed for seemingly no reason. Someone should do it right - for the big screen. Now is definitely the time to tell this story. The visions from that era of a PC on every desktop and in every home have finally come to fruition.
To say that Jobs stole from Xerox is silly. That was what Gates said to jobs, something like "You're problem is broke into Xerox's house to rob them, and now you're upset that I'm making off with the TV." I can't remember the quote exactly, but Apple made a deal with Xerox to get their engineers into PARC, and Gates didn't steal from the Xerox STAE system, he stole from the Apple Macintosh system. A big difference. Name one product Gates hasn't filched. Well, you probably can, but's it's probably not a very good one.
Vidar
The brains of a chicken, coupled with the claws of two eagles, may well hatch the eggs of our destruction.
I agree. Nothing beats a Microsoft mouse (except that MS still hasn't come out w/ a good 3 button mouse. Damn Wheel that won't do anything in X)
I like their Joysticks too.
As for software . . . . nowhere near as good.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Linux can :)
Use the GPM (if you want to copy and paste with X, just set up X to use the GPM as a repeater.. It's all in the docs)
-- Ace
I don't know whether or not this is what the producer intended, but I thought that the acid-dropping was kind of foreshadowing what Steve Jobs would experience as CEO of Apple. During the acid-dropping, he talks about how everything is doing what he wants, that he's orchestrating the wind and the wheatfield...and then he just falls down and passes out. Like I said, I don't know if that was what the producer intended, but that's what I got out of it.
Hmmm....
Oh well....don't feed the Troll!
--- "It's not enough that I succeed...everyone else must fail."
The only thing Apple actually licensed from Xerox was Smalltalk, and they didn't even use that.
LJS
The only thing Apple paid for was Smalltalk.
LJS
You never hear the stories of how Microsoft had all the same PARC information, but they did. I have heard from Microsoft employees who were there at the time, and it's also provable from the historical record. The first issue of PC Magazine (February 82 I think) has an interview with Bill Gates in which he talks about the importance of graphical user interfaces in the future of computing. The interview had to have taken place in late 81, and the Lisa didn't ship until late 83-early 84.
By the way, Apple paid licensing fees to Xerox, but only for Smalltalk, not anything else.
LJS
Windows 1.0 shipped in 85 I think. Utterly useless product. Windows 2.0 was almost useful, at least for Excel, and I know it was shipping in 87. Windows 3 shipped in 90 I think, and 3.1 in late 91-early 92.
LJS
Yeah, and I suppose such past historical luminaries as Brutus, Cortez, Benedict Arnold, or, I dunno, Hitler, had nothing to do with this? Get real. Could you possibly get any lazier than to take a stab at Nixon (in general) or Gates (on this board)? Christ. For all of his faults, Nixon was a foreign policy genius (S America not withstanding), which is more than can be said for a certain current president, and at least he left office without bestowing upon the populace a massive, crushing national debt. If you think Gates is evil incarnate, great, don't use his stuff. Somehow I don't think anyone is gonna cry. But keep your pathetic, lazy bumper-sticker rants to yourself.
Wow! What a misleading title to that comment!
Here I was ready to whip out the Aristotle, and it turns out you were dead right, though I'd have put it a little differently. Truthfully, if the *majority* of American's were selfish (the egoist version, not the 'church' version -- which is really greed) enough, then those problems of corrupt legislature and over-bearing big business would tend to be curtailed a little more: by the freedom to choose an alternative that they'd be happy with.
The problem with powerful people (calling themselves Communists, or Capitalists) is that they don't like competition.
Howsomeever (invented that one):
The best argument against Communism that I've heard is most quickly summed up in this way: Theft of production from the producer results in no motivation to produce.
I guess what most people feel about capitalism is that it is totalitarianistic path most big corporations (world wide, unless they are prevented from doing so by the legislature, see 'theft' above) take: Absorb all the means of production, and prevent anyone else from competing (MS -- at least I think so, IBM, Standard Oil, the Utility companies, etc). They invent or legislate reasons for this (it's more efficient geographically, we have better technologies, etc), but bullying a potential competitor is *bad*. It is also NOT capitalism. In capitalism, the better innovator wins because (s)he is better at it.
If the argument is: America is not a very good capitalist country (just the current front-runner on our little globe), then I agree totally. If it's: capitalism is bad, then I don't.
At any rate, this 'dumb American' has to go back to work writing a device module for our video hardware. I'll catch you on the flip side. I loved the reply, though.
ps: If anyone out there's taken advantage of the bigphys patch under the 2.2 release, let me know! The 2.0 version is working great, but 2.2 is giving me all sorts of 'oops'es.
pps: Excuse the grammar -- I'm an engineer, not a lit. major.
Not so. In the very early 80s, I replaced the CP/M CCP and BDOS with my own network shell redirector written in Z80 assembler to allow our CP/M computers to get to a $30,000 50-megabyte hard drive we purchased (yup, that was how much it cost). It not only had C> but also P> and Z>
While I'm sure the C> in the film was a gaffe, it would be logical that someone within Microsoft would have also hacked around with CP/M as well.
I do believe Microsoft sold a Z80 CP/M board for the Apple ][ and it ran CP/M. (showing my age, I just turned 40 this past week...)
Woz on the Apple III side, not Apple II, He made the Apple III, that could operate as an Apple II, but it never worked out and flopped, and when the cops almost busted them, it was because their car broke down and the cops were offering help, the blue box didnt look like that, they told them it was a computer sound generator (and it was tiny and had no keys cept the tone key). He threw humongous parties before he quit, and i dont think he got his degree.
Overall, a great movie (I loved the bulldozer part), but needs reworking
At the end of the movie, it mentions that MS owns a small part of Apple. I believe they are referring to the 50 million dollar investment in Apple.
Well... the 50 million dollars was not an investment. It was part of a settlement. There's a big difference between owning and owing in my book.
I didn't see that as a continuity problem, but rather as one of Gates' few clever lines. I.e.,
*he* knew it was a no-op. But that's probably giving him (or the script writer) too much credit.
i agree...anthony michael hall was awesome as gates...very good acting.
:)
i also ended up watching wierd science after they played the movie 3x
Sensei
Sensei
Linuxnewbie.org home of the NHF's
It was rather entertaining, wasn't it? Though I do think that the film could have used some more technical elements, I thought it was fun to see how their personal lives unfolded :)
Let's face it, "Pirates of Silicon Valley" was way too short. I taped it last night, editing out the commercials as it was showing, and my VCR displayed only 1 hour and 32 minutes of real footage! To order of copy of (the nearly 3 hour) Triumph of the Nerds from Blockbuster video for $42.49 (slighly cheaper than PBS's listing of $49.95), click here.
--Bahamlabs
(as an aside)
Although occasionaly PBS re-broadcasts the episodes, you can buy the tapes and companion book from PBS at:
http://shop.pbs.org/CMgXWrrVmX/products/C1808/
I'd highly recommend it. Let Hollywood have their artistic license, I'll stick with PBS.
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
The movie was pretty good for basic cable fare, with the sex/personal life angles fluffed up way more than they should have been (then again, we're talking about a made-for-TV movie here).
Anthony Michael Hall was simply amazing as Bill Gates. This guy can flat-out act. I couldn't even see Hall behind the Gates persona.
I thought all the actors had their real life coparts mannerisms down pat...but the guy that played Steve Ballmer had me lol!
I am a die hard Mac user, but any one who thought this movie was too hard on Steve Jobs should read some of the books about Apple's history. Then again "what is history but a fable agreed upon?"
Yes, the movie has some serious time-line issues, but I really didn't have a problem with them fluffing up the Jobs/Lisa issues. The movie wasn't intended to be an anthology on the great technical(or, in MS' case, not so great) advances made during the time period, but was meant to try and capture some of the emotions and desire that started what we think of as computer culture. The whole idea that Jobs wanted absolute genius and creativity is very art-house inspired(before the laid-back computer geek atmosphere of many technical companies today, almost no workplace would have allowed t-shirts for employees, much less sandals, shorts, and long hair.) I think the LSD scene will be taken way out of proportion by a huge chunk of the viewing audience, but it was a way of showing that Jobs was a little further out there than Woz and the others. I think they used it as a cumbersome way to show how much Jobs wanted the world to move to his 'divine vision' as well. I haven't read much on Jobs' issues with his baby, so I can't argue much for or against the way they dealt with it. Given the other 'Jobs' attributes, it seems plausible.
But most of all, I appreciated the fact that they captured a lot of the spirit that was the personality of both Microsoft and Apple, and became the spirit that continued on into the popularization of the web, which I think caused some serious changes in the way computer companies worked. I had no issues with them dropping the distance between the birthday party and Jobs' return to Apple, nor did I have issues with downplaying Woz's quitting. They could quite easily have a separate story about Woz, but this was not Woz's movie. They made it obvious that Woz quitting was a punch in the gut for Jobs, but he continued on.
Overall, I liked the movie, despite a few inconsistencies with RL. It was a good presentation of the excitement, devotion, and range of emotions that computers caused among a (then) new sector of American society. I made my non-techie roomie sit down and watch one of the repeats, and he started asking me all sorts of questions about whether it was really like that and was that really how it happened. I think it did more good for the image of the origins of "Computer Cowboys" than it did harm. Especially in the light of such awful made for theater horrors as _Hackers_.
If anything, I think this TNT creation has woefully misled people as to the real Bill Gates. This being not just the man who made quick-witted business decisions, but the man who was close to a genious in his own right- having comfortably majored in mathematics at Harvard. The man who slept in his high school computer lab and developed his visions for a personal computer world. It was not by accident or any single dirty trick that things worked out for this guy.
Through the chopped up portrayal that was this story, I think Mr. Gates was unfairly portrayed as nothing more than a lucky scoundral rather than the great mind that he is. As much as you may hate this fact, it is the truth.
>>a- Know what features X has.
Which you obviously don't. Or perhaps the only way you can support your arguement is to use an old, obsolete version of the MacOS as your evidence. You mention shortcomings tith Apple's memory management and multitasking. These deficencies have long since been fixed. My copy of OS X Server runs quite nicely on my Mac thank you very much.
>>been 'kludged' to support multiple applications
I'd hardly call the Mach kernel a kludge.
>>b- Don't insult me, abuse me, or condemn me for
>>making my decision.
Intresting that this statement follows a long rant in which you do exatly this to Mac users.
>>Bill Gates only wants your money. Steve Jobs
>>wants your soul.
Well, of course bill only wants your money, he obviously already has YOUR soul.
Imagine all the people...
Thank you
GUI's were evil 10 years ago? Really, I did not know that. Especially with Windows already being out and many DOS-based programs using GUIs of their own. You know, for a guy who obviously advocates Macs, I find it funny that you would dare call anyone else "SHEEP". Apple is notorious for eat this and like it. Closed off architecture, closed off operating system. They hound Microsoft about open-source? Geez! At least I have more of a choice in what goes into my computer.
Besides, back in the 3.1 days, I never went into Windows if I could help it. Practically everything I did was in DOS. I have '98 on here now, and I like it a lot better. Is it because I'm a SHEEP. No, it's because it has been improved. I also use Linux though, cos in all actuallity, I still love my CLI.
"Are you a pirate?" "Yes, I'm a pirate!"
"Think Different". More like "Think Like Apple".
Oh, and do you consider it biased to just not
talk about the other platform? I'd like to see a Mac Mag try that approach (like most respectable PC mags do).
My only qualm with the movie was that they completely left out a significant part of computer history: The Commodore 64, which (as i understand) still is the best selling computer of all time. Both Commodore and Atari made significant contributions to the computer industry, and I am sure the computer's (C64 and later Amiga) from commodore helped mold the future of the macintosh.
Be careful about the sequel with RMS and Linus, it may all be a little bit of history repeating. I saw a lot of lines in there that could be used in the the Linux v. Microsoft sequel. A group of hackers with purpose trying to revolutionize the computing world. Spending the early years going unnoticed by big brother as the guerrilla warfare begins. And ambitions of toppling the reigning king of the hill.
AT&T's original Unix will play the role of the Xerox GUI as the original source from which all ideas were taken.
was when Steve Jobs' partner pointed to the "big brother" in the 1984 commercial and then pointed to Gates. Quite a revalation.
Of course Gates had a couple of great lines as well: when he was on the phone with the Altair guy, he told Woz that he needed to convince this guy, who didn't know what he needed, that he needed what Microsoft had and that only Microsoft could give it to him. A philosophy that has continued for years.
And the second good Gates comment was at the end when Jobs said Apple's stuff was better, and Gates gestured to the NEC running Windows and said it didn't matter. Another philosophy that continues today.
And although both Gates and Jobs were pirates, with Jobs stealing from Xerox and Gates from Jobs, Jobs created the Mac, and Gates??? well, Gates and Paul Allen didn't appear to create anything since they wrote their little piece of code for the Altair.
I hope plenty of Windows users saw this so they can see the depths from which their operating system came from.