Had an opportunity to watch the JOBS biopic movie and have to say it really didn’t get to the meat of the man at all. Having read a number of titles about the man and Apple’s development over the years I found the treatment to be so superficial and too focused on the 1970 props and costumes. Given the place of Apple and Steve’s contribution to the computer industry – this film reminds me of the two versions of “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” where the first version was a pale version of the remake – it just failed to hit the mark. I actually felt that if they had deliberately tried to avoid the main achievements of Jobs and Apple they probably could not have done more. An example was the 5 seconds of the launch of Next – they obviously had not been involved in IT or even spoken to someone working there at the time of the launch.
This failure isn’t the first and won’t be the last film based on Technology and the characters who inhabited that world for the last 40 years – why do the get it so wrong ? It strikes me that the film makers are not really in touch with the IT culture or take the view that all IT people are “nerds”. Perhaps if they spent some time reading “The Cuckoo’s Egg” and “Microserfs” perhaps they might see the humour and drama that has been part of the development of technology since the 60’s. Perhaps a couple of years spent reading back issue of Byte would have informed the filmmakers of the rollercaster ride that was IT in the 70s and 80s.
If you want to see the real characters that built the technology and software that you use today – you could do worse than watch “Triumph of the Nerds“. You can still get the DVD here