Pirates of Silicon Valley
Pirates of Silicon Valley
Good artists create… Great artists steal.
Pirates of Silicon Valley is a movie capturing the intertwined fate of young Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs in the 70ies and each of their parallel journey in building two of the most revolutionary empires in the field of technology. As described by Wikipedia, the 1999 television drama is an unauthorized made-for-television docudrama written and directed by Martyn Burke, documenting the rise of the personal computer through the rivalry between Apple Computer and Microsoft. Aside from Steve Jobs (Noah Wyle) and Bill Gates (Anthony Michael Hall) as leading characters of the story, the movie also features Steve Wozniac (Joey Slotnick), co-founder of Apple, as one of the key figures and the somewhat less-confident good guy.
In an interview with CNN, actor Noah Wyle who played as Jobs elaborated the characters, “These kids [...] were in the garage tinkering with their electronics and starting a revolution that was a thousand times greater than anything that was going on on the college campuses, politically.”. Certain part of the plot itself is believed to be built up by series of fictionalized events and as how most Hollywood-coated television dramas are, the characters are creatively interpreted in order to get as much juice from the occurrences as possible, hence depicting the most out of evil genius Gates and raging hippie Jobs. Even so, the dramatization hasn’t understated the movie’s historical and documentary value, as Sam Sutherland from Amazon.com noted the plot to be providing “.. a pointed sense of the cultural divide between the hip, self-absorbed Apple cofounder and the brilliant alpha geek behind Microsoft’s eventual software empire, contrasting the Mac’s countercultural underpinnings with the PC’s more strait-laced origins.”.
Some also noted that the TNT-aired drama being made too early and both the first or perhaps a sequel would undoubtedly hit today’s box office. To an extent, the drama could possibly be an iconic cult classic for the latter generation of technopreneurs — the generation of Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, MySpace’s Tom Anderson and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. The movie ends with stills telling Jobs’ return to Apple as its CEO and Gates as the richest man of the world. Last June, the now-philanthropist Bill Gates retired from Microsoft.
“I don’t want you to think of this as just a film, some process of converting electrons and magnetic impulses into shapes and figures and sounds. No. Listen to me. We’re here to make a dent in the universe.”
– Pirates of Silicon Valley
Also check out Atari, movie on the inventor of Pong and founder of Atari, Nolan Bushnell. Due to be released in year 2009.
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hmm… thinking about finding this movie again in rentals… 
