Early Apple Employees Talk Memories of Steve Jobs, Thoughts On New Movie 146
Nerval's Lobster writes "Daniel Kottke and Bill Fernandez had front-row seats to the birth of the personal computing industry, as well as the most valuable technology company in the world. Both served as employees of Apple Computer in its earliest days: Kottke working with the hardware, Fernandez developing the user interfaces. Both have some strong opinions about the new feature film Jobs, which dramatizes the personal and professional escapades of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and his more technically inclined partner, Steve Wozniak. Kottke consulted on early versions of the script, attended the movie's premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in February, and is currently planning to see it again shortly after its release on August 16. Fernandez, on the other hand, hasn't seen it and doesn't intend to, because he considers it a work of fiction and thinks it will upset him. In this lengthy interview with Slashdot, both attempted to distinguish the facts and longstanding geek legends from the instances of pure creative license exercised by the filmmakers."
Re:Hey, remember when Steve used to screw us over? (Score:5, Insightful)
My personal favorite Steve Jobs "asshole moment" was when he came back to the company in the 90's. One of his first acts as CEO was to end all of Apple's charitable giving programs. Such a sweet fella. I think that's even better than when he used to regularly park his Porsche in handicapped spots (starting back in the 80's, long before he was sick, mind you).
Re:A legend? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Perhaps Pirate of Silicon Valley is better? (Score:4, Insightful)
While I'm not exactly interested in seeing Jobs, I am curious to see how Jobs compares to Pirates.
Re:the cynic in me revolts. (Score:4, Insightful)
the man is more of a pop culture consumer electronics icon than he ever was a tech mogul
Well put. Non-techies go "ooh, ahh" because the end products are what they see. Meanwhile, how many people have heard of Nyquist, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Shannon, Kilby, Noyce and all the other tech pioneers and inventors who made this stuff possible. Money? Sure, but there are others with more. Nor is Jobs even colorful enough to be interesting, like Howard Hughes. Please stop, this is getting worse than the 24x7 coverage of the OJ trial.
Re:Link to film (Score:4, Insightful)
"pure creative license" my apps. (Score:3, Insightful)
it's not "pure creative license," it's revisionist history.
Re:Hey, remember when Steve used to screw us over? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Birth of PC - Altair, not Apple (Score:4, Insightful)
It was indeed Apple, Radio Shack, and Commodore who started the home computer industry. They were the first packaged systems which could be purchased, set up, and operated by a normal person.
Apple, especially for the relatively low cost/high performance disk drive Woz developed, which made things like Visicalc practical.
A partnership (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate to break it to you, but without Woz it is highly likely that nobody would even have heard of Jobs.
And without Jobs it's pretty unlikely most of us would have heard of Woz. It was a partnership and while it lasted a pretty remarkable one. Woz was a technical genius and Jobs was a sales/design genius. You need both to be successful, especially in a startup.