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Cringely's take on "Pirates of Silicon Valley"
whitefox writes "Robert X. Cringely gives his two cents on the TNT movie. He makes an interesting point against the sloppy screenwriting and how most people will accept the movie as the truth and never know the "real" history behind the biggest fortune in the world - not like that's ever happened before. "
It is too bad that they didn't even mention the fact that Steve basically did it all over again with NeXT, while Billy-boy was still stealing software in the same old pattern for most of the '90s.
-awc
This always happens when a community starts to embrace its own unique stories. I mean, do you *really* think that Odysseus was really out adventuring that whole decade? (I have it on good authority that he actually spent the better part of those ten years recovering from the party they had after sacking Troy, which rates as one of the top three parties of all time).
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Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Looking at Woz's site (and the amount of respect I have for him), having read Fire In the Valley, I'd have to believe Woz and his comments about the truth over what Cringely is saying.
Cringley comes across as someone who was probably asked to do the movie, but declined.
Triumph of the Nerds was a superior piece of documentary work.
Many people (including my mother) watched Pirates and were intrigued. I told them to watch Triumph to get the real (and whole) story, but a non-geek can not seem to commit to a loooonnnnngggg docu about computers. Sigh.
Marketing 1, History 0
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
I really like what Cringely writes, useally.
this time it's more like a cry baby responce.
Based on Woz remarkes the TNT film was probably a very good prtrail of those early days. He really liked His portrail and Jobs. He also notes that they get some stuff wrong, mostly technical and time fraim mistakes, but does that really matter?
I should note that I didn't see the TNT film so maybe I'M wrong.
BTW, you guys better check Woz.org again, he added a LOT of cool replies to emails including a lot of Apple history scoops and insights. And some stuff about his other projects CL9, the USfests of 82 and 83. And meaty stuff about blue boxs and the like..
gets better everyday.
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( my music)
Well, there's real history - a deliberate effort to understand what truly happened from evidence and records, and there's 'pop' history, which is written by the consortium with the biggest advt/production budget for the casual media consumer.
Chuck
"People who think they know everything are particularly annoying to those of us who do"
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Anyways, his basic take has been that while they certainly mixed up times and places, they did accurately portray the personalities. He even said that yes, he would skip the meal at those fancy shin digs and go to Dennys later. He didn't know how they knew that. It cracked me up when he said that in the movie, and I busted a gut when I found it it was actually true.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
What I have heard from most people who I would not think of as in-depth computer enthusiasts, geeks, nerds, or the like, is that Bill Gates came off looking like a sociopathic theif, and Steve Jobs a big jerk.
I didn't watch the movie, myself.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Bob needs to get a grip if he is being serious. I prefer to give Cringely the benefit of the doubt and assume that he must be jokeing. Just like Metcalf was jokeing about the death of linux. The "Priates of Silicon Valley" was a TNT movie, not a Frontline, NOVA or National Geographic documentory. What did he expect? Truth, Justice and the American Way? Cheers, gbs
Does anyone know of a place to order the Triumph of the Nerds video? -thanks Ben
When Cringely makes comments like "And I'm the guy who knows it all. If you happen to be a friend of Oliver Stone, please give him my number", it makes me wonder if he's just bitter about not being the one who got to tell the story. He knows all of it? I doubt that.
No sig.
What more of the Silicon valley's history. according to Cringley.
Pass I have lived here since 1963,Silicon Valley needs urban renewal,not cringley,not Steve jobs.
'Pirates' was about the personalities behind the PC revolution. My mom spent 10 years working for Apple and being within what she calls the "Apple culture". She has met Woz, Steve Jobs, and all of those CEO's that apple went through. I was able to watch the movie with her and she said that the personalites that were portrayed in the movie were 100% accurate, and that the strange unity/devisiveness within the apple culture was accurate as well.
She was brought aboard apple in 1987 when Apple was phasing(sp?) out the Apple ][ series and trying to convince people to buy these new Macintosh's. Her job was to sell to school districts and to convince them that this was the way to go. Then last year, she was laid off due to the downsizing of the education sales force.
When all is said and done, she says she really liked Woz, that he was indeed a kind human being who was into the art of being a geek, and that Job's was an "arrogant SOB". Plus I got some pretty cool stuff out of growing up in a house where I had lots of cool hardware around me, and going down to the engineers area at the Apple offices was always fun. Plus, I got a dollar bill signed by Woz, which, if you know the story about Woz and $2 bills and the US government coming after him for defacement, it was pretty hard to convince him to sign it. And I got a little nameplate from one of the original Lisa boxes that I have taped to the front of my new G3 (which, incidentally, runs Linux and not MacOS).
-Ben
bensmith@biz1.net
Without the brilliance of a Wozniak to provide enought momentum to Apple for it to last a couple of decades (before Bill Gates colonized them), Apple would have crashed and burned under Steve Jobs' "vision". Next was a disaster. Think different, read history, not ad copy.
Considering Cringely attitude, it's not surpising he wasn't asked to write the screenplay.
I can't take anything this man says seriously. Here is a liar and a fraud. Triumph of the Nerds misrepresents suff just as badly as "Pirates of Silicon Valley" did. For example, did you know that Xerox had a huge investment in apple. That is why apple was brought to Xerox. Steve jobs didn't even want to go. Also, the lisa interface was taken from the mac project before steve jobs even started working on the mac. Some where on Cringely's site there is a letter from the origional mac creator (not steve jobs) where he writes something to the effect of: oh well, fake man, fake history.
enough said
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in a world without bounderies or fences, who needs Gates anyway?
Man.... what a whiner. 'I did it first', 'I did it better', 'they copied me'. Get over it. Nerds was a PBS show for nerds and it fit its audience. Pirates was a made for TV movie and it fit its audience.
Pirates was actually better in my opinion because now my friends and family have a much better understanding of why I have so much contempt for Gates and Microsoft.
Quoting my mom, 'wait a minute... you mean bill gates didn't invent windows?'.
The Cringe' has got a point. Why do people get so confused between art and reality? People get mad at Oliver Stone for his movie "Nixon" and yet similar "interpretations" of history by Shakespeare slide?
People have got to "read between the lines" and understand that Hollywood tells stories. The purpose of art is to entertain, not tell the truth. Know the difference.
I think for this movie, the atmosphere was much more important than the facts. The producers seemed to be trying to capture the mentality and competitiveness that surrounded these two icons of the computer industry, and I think they did a good job of it. So what if a few of the events were slightly askew or out of order. My mother actually commented to me after watching that movie that she would love to destroy her computer after realizing how much of an asshole both Gates and Jobs are. Although that is obviously overkill, I think it is a important attitude. A lot of people in American society idolize Gates and Jobs (and many others), and to be honest, these guys really are not very good ideals. This movie helps show that.
Great operating system. This thing you're using right now called the World Wide Web (ever heard of it?) was developed on a NeXT. I happen to love NeXT computers. If you ask me, Windows is a disaster. I don't think you have to be the most successful company in the world to be successful. For example, some of my favorite movies weren't unqualified box office blockbusters -- but they're still awesome films. I mean, what's your barometer? If it's money then you obviously know nothing about Steve Wozniak.
Besides, why don't you take Pixar into consideration. There's a brilliant and (in your terms) successful company that's actually made the world a better place.
For the love of crimeny, man, Steve Jobs has vision!
Scary how many of the great songs and great computers are inspired by chemicals.
With a wealth of books and Apple scripts floating around Hollywood over the years (I've read most of them -- interestingly enough the best I read were being developed at Tom Hank's company and would have been a miniseries a la his Space series) and the fact that the Pirate's director was a documentary filmmaker leads me to think that it would have just been unnessesary overhead to hire Cringley. He's just bitter that his project wasn't optioned, purchased, and shot.
Two books to read:
(1) "Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing" by Randall E. Stross
(2) "Apple (The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders)" by Jim Carlton
You can check the reviews at Amazon.
at work we have had NeXTstations since they debuted; and none have caused any problems... well, the rollers on the printers are starting to go; but after nearly a decade, that is to be expected.
PostScript is pretty sweet as well. And the origin for graphics was in the lower left corner, where it should be for the positive axes. Diagram is the best for flow charts, love the drag n drop. And aplha blending that everyone is so nuts about -- developed on the NeXT. DOOM and Quake -- developed on NeXT. Carmack himself has many times evangelized the NeXT.
Maybe you couldn't get a handle on CMYB or have something against the M68k. But hey, anything that runs on BSD (4.x, if I recall), supports networking out of the box, and runs for years without a hitch can't be all bad.
At the moment I am in love with Window Maker, cause it looks like the NeXT, and OpenStep is too expensive.
A. MullinThere was a /. article a while back about his PhD being bogus, if I remember correctly. Hit the archives to confirm.
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DNA just wants to be free...
It has been mentioned several times that PoSV is meant to be a purely entertaining piece. But I think the real point is not so much the acuracy of its technical details so much as it is the type charcaters it portrays.
Although the "film" is technically inaccurate and has a garbled, misleading time line, it shows quite well the content of the charcaters hearts. Even if the "non-geek" viewers out there think its fact (which they polly don't because most people are smarter than that), they still leave with the sence that these two guys (Gates and Jobs) aren't wonderful people that we should admire. I think that is the real point of the piece and I'll wager that a good number of the "non-geek" community realises that.
Give them a little credit - will ya. Most people aren't that stupid.
Many people saw a similarity between "Pirates of Silicon Valley" and my own "Triumph of the Nerds." Me too.
Well, DUH, Cringley...it's because you're both based on the same events. Of course people are going to see a similarity. I mean, does he think that the history of Apple and Microsoft belongs solely to him? Methinks he's just pissed that he didn't get a dramatic movie off the ground before them.
I think it's appropriate that the graphic on the article is of a frog croaking.
Forget Bill and Steve, Linus and Alan are the real heros.
If I'm not mistaken, this Cringley is not the Cringley that did the TOTN series, or wrote Accidental Empires. PBS owns the name Robert X. Cringley.
Mmmmm.....
No sig.
I gave up submitting new Cringely columns a while back 'cause it either never got posted or it was posted several days late from somebody else, but he's had quite a few worth reading in the past few months. I thought the interesting thing about this one (which will probably be superseded within 24 hours, they usually come out late on Thursdays)was the part at the end about AOL getting in bed with Hughes instead of some other satellite company. Cringely comes across like a Steve Thomas standard generic preppy PBS host clone on TV but his columns are often interesting and insightful observations and theories about where the computer biz and culture is heading and why.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I recommend that everyone here listen to the commentary on the laserdisk for Sid and Nancy. What's interesting about it is the comments by people who were alive during that time, and most of their gripes are in the minutae details. For example, Sid would never have worn a tee-shirt with a Hammer and Sickle on it, it would have been a Swastika.
One of the people talking on the commentary is the director of the documentary on the Sex Pistols, and he comments on how the movie is f*cking with his memories. But it's a brilliant film, and it captures the *essense* and *spirit* of Sid and Nancy perfectly, even if the details are different than some peoples memories. Ultimately details aren't as important in movies as emotions.
The big complaint from the people who "were there" is that the ending of the film alters how Nancy was killed. In the film, she hurls herself into his knife during a heroin induced rage (which is why the films tagline was "Love Kills")...it's a very classically mythical ending. The REAL ending was that she was probably killed by a drug dealer who was taking money from them while they were conked out. Now, the better ending was the one the filmmakers chose -- not the reality. But it was originally scripted as it actually happened. But Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb over the course of the film became their characters, and the movie took on its own parallel reality (as often happens when you're making an intense film).
The point is that history is less important ultimately than storytelling. History changes with peoples perceptions of the events. History isn't perfect. Storytelling is a different art altogether. Through storytelling you can transcend all the mundane banalities of reality and go for the visceral and core truths in emotion...which is what I believe they did in Pirates.
I'm currently prepping a movie about Salvador Dali, the Spanish Surrealist. And my belief is that because I'm not Dali, I'll NEVER be able to make a movie that is the absolute truth of his life. All I can hope to do is find the truth of Dali in *me*. That's all any dramatic filmmaker can hope to achieve.
Cringley needs to calm down. He wasn't there. The memories of what happened don't belong to him. The story belongs to the world.
-Roger Avary
Director
Hits: Apple 2, Mac Classic, Laser Printer, Toy Story, Bugs Life, iMac ****
So-so's: Apple-3, Mac-2 ***
Lemon: NeXT hardware (software nice) ***
Not-on-his-watch: Newton ***
Anyone counting Bill's record?
The PBS documentary was far more accurate,
but the Pirate movie more dramatic.
I don't think so
"And I'm the guy who knows it all. If you happen to be a friend of Oliver Stone, please give him my number."
Talk about a pact with the devil. Cringly spends all that time barfing on PoSV for it not getting the story right and bending the truth when in fact Oliver Stone, his supposed saviour, has done more to bend historical truth like a prism than anyone in recent memory. Just look at Platoon (depicts 1 unit causing all of the attrocities comitted by U.S. troops in Viet Nam), JFK practically makes Oswald a working class hero and implicates L. B. J. as architect of JFK's assination and finally Nixon (portrays this Republican Hero as a theif and liar and rasist - wait he got that one right!)
History is such a wonderful study and a terrible tool. The way people feel a need to rewrite history to justify their current posisision is terrible. I remember in High School learning about the Ionian Revolt against Persian Tyranny and what a wonderful and grand struggle it was. Later in life I found out that the Ionians wanted to replace Persian Tyranny with Ionian Tyranny...
If you want history - don't expect to get it from TNT.
--Pete
I remember being really annoyed as I watched "Triumph", as
it depicted people like Gates and Jobs as the heroes, but
barely mentioned the technical people who really invented
the stuff we use today.
At least the TNT movie brought to light the fact that Seattle
Computing wrote DOS. I'd bet that 90% of the population, if
asked, would tell you that Bill Gates wrote it.
I have to agree with Cringely that PofSV just gets too many things wrong to be considered a good fictionalized business history story, even if it's true to the "essence" of the characters. While I understand the focus on Jobs and Gates from a dramatic POV, the real story is so much more complex and interesting, with so many people involved in the happenstance, blind luck, missed and stolen opportunities that shaped the industry. Plus, the resonance of so many turning points is missed with the lack of technical detail on why things were happening. No mention of Jobs working at Atari, no mention of Woz coding "Breakout," no Gary Kildall as the could-have-been Gates or anything on his CP/M. The historic visit to Xerox PARC also comes off wrong.
Gates gets much less screen time than Jobs (maybe because he never had an illegitimate child) and as a result even his landmark deal to provide IBM with an OS for their Acorn PC project (misrepresented in the film, since it was IBM who came knocking at Gates' door, not the other way around) gets less play than it deserves. The timeline and staffing of the early Microsoft is also very fuzzy, as is the whole move of M$ from selling programming languages to selling OSs and applications. No mention of Traf-o-Data or the fact that Gates was making money as a programmer when he was 12, either.
IMHO, "Triumph of the Nerds," though a documentary, is a far richer and more dramatic offering. PofSV might just as well have been an entirely fictional story "inspired by actual events."
The Cringley name is owned by Infoworld. There was some lawsuit over Mark Stephens continued use of the name after he was fired from Infoworld. Looks like he won the use of the name. The Cringely column has been written by a number of people.
Mark Stephens is the Cringely of PBS, and the fibber on Stanford PHDs.
Look here for the Wall Street Journal's version.
0 88.html
http://xent.ics.uci.edu/FoRK-archive/summer96/0
But Torvolds rules the world!
That was a pretty good article... Aside from the fact that he kept calling DirecTV and DirecPC "Direct TV" and "Direct PC".
We get bombarded all the time with lies. Look, all great artists are liars. Tolstoy: not a historian, rather a novelist. Shakespeare: hired gun for the Tudor regime. Spielberg: myth maker (or distorter). So what? They're still great entertainers.
Does Disney's treatment of "Pocahontas" outrage you? F***, it doesn't bother me. I know that they didn't have cameras in Jamestown and that forest animals don't talk.
Dude, you have a problem. You confuse reality with art.
BTW, Stone's "Platoon", "Born on", "JFK" , "Nixon" and "Natural" are some the best Hollywood Movies of our times.
Cringely is whining. I lived through most of what is covered in the book and movie, right here in Silicon Valley. The movie is guilty of what movies always do: simplifying and taking license, so that they can present a story in a short time.
Cringely complains about accuracy, yet my recollection is that Mike Swaine had a hand in the writing of the book.
I anticipated revisionism, but found very little, and none of it critical to the story. I expected a pro-Apple slant, and didn't find that, either.
The story showed that both Jobs and Gates are driven and not very nice people. Few could argue that point.
Also, as Woz found little to complain of (and he was clearly much closer to the story than Cringely) I think we should write off these rants as being just a tantrum.
--- Bill
For the most part, as of now, this article confused me in that "what the hell is this" kind of way. They guy wanders off point halfway through, and ends up talking about AOL and loans and deals and.....huh?? But the first part that was on subject was interesting in the "oh look, this guy's kind of conceited isn't he?" kind of way. He didn't like the movie because the documentary was better (I gather that he made said documentary, so that may not be the most objective opinion), and because in the movie, Bill Gates went to IBM, while really it was IBM who went to Bill Gates. That was the only reason he gave that I could find. That comment blew me away. It's poetic license! And it's so small that it's hardly worth mentioning. I'm glad that the scriptwriters changed it; I mean, how entertaining would it have been to see the IBM executives running towards their plane on their way to Microsoft with "Synchronicity I" playing in the background? :)
Was the TNT production completely and utterly correct? Probably not. But what is except reality itself? But was it entertaining...? AY! There's the rub. And yes it was. I thought so anyway.
The kryptonite comments in the article just plain threw me off.
"Get out of my way! Can't you see I'm trying to save the world!!" -Xion
This video is sold by PBS Home Video at 800-828-4PBS (800-828-4727). I think it's about $50, but there may be shipping and handling added to that. If they ask you if you are an educational institution, say "no" because they charge teachers more. (How's that for the logic of educational TV?)
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I didn't get the "are you a virgin?" from him. Instead, he screamed "I bet you drive a GM car, DON'T YOU!?" at me in a meeting in which I dared to suggest he consider a different strategic direction for NeXT.
Ironically, six months later, he was doing what I had suggested--not because I suggested it, of course, but because the financial and market realities gave him no other choice, which had been my point. What a complete jerk!
> Excellent credentials for spotting invented
> histories, eh? "It takes one to know one", and
> all that.
... hrm?
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DNA just wants to be free...