Pirates Of Silicon Valley: Don’t Think of It as A film …

Well …

Hmmm …

You know, it’s not often me and Adrian will watch a made for TV film.

Tonight we did, though. And I know Adrian — an even bigger open source fan than me — wasn’t too stunned that it didn’t mention Linux.

But the ten year old “Pirates Of Silicon Valley” is definitely interesting, for those of us who take an interest in technology.

It’s basically a docu-drama that follows the original founding of Apple and Microsoft, and follows them up to 1985, when Steve Jobs was fired by then Apple CEO, John Sculley; and adds a footnote about the return of Jobs, and his alliance with Microsoft, in 1997.

And it does remind us about one thing that many forget; that both Jobs and Gates are hard-headed businessmen.

One early scene has Anthony Michæl Hall as a very creepy Bill Gates negotiating a signing bonus out of the company behind the Altair. (And blatantly ‘socially engineering’ a prototype Mac, in order to copy the GUI, in a later scene.)

Not that Jobs comes off much better, although Mac fan that I am, I’m personally inclined to his side of things. I think I’m with Adrian, here; I hate to work in an atmosphere that looked like it prevailing at Apple, at the time*.

It’s interesting to see how the computer revolution of the 1970’s started, though; which makes “Pirates” worth watching — although it’s not necessarily telling me anything I didn’t know, it does tell it in a reasonably entertaining way.

And does make one wonder about the difference between the ideals we hold when young and what we end doing, later in life.

*        Whether he’s got a point about open source operating systems being the next computer revolution, I don’t know; at one end, the simple fact that we live in a Windoze dominated world means that there’s a set of standards to work to. On another, Apple manage to innovate a look quicker than their bigger rival. And on the third other hand, open source does mean that you and me can re-write, copy, hand out, whatever piece of software we want to. Guess we’ll have to see what the next few years bring. But OpenOffice.org and Firefox are only getting bigger …