The best bit was the casting of Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. He will for
the rest of his life be typecast as a nerd. I didn't think that the show was as
hard as I'd heard on Bill Gates. He's just a victim of his own ceaseless talent
for overselling and overleveraging his product. I think they portray Steve as
an inwardly focused dreamer (which I interpret as correct) who struggled with
his own identity among the power geeks of the era -- a story not unlike mine, so
I can empathize.
The most interesting themes though were Steve Jobs' connection with his estran-
ged girlfriend and daughter (why does the dynamic here go unexplained?), and the
constant comparisons between Harvard Stuffed Shirts and Berkeley New Radicals --
San Francisco vs. Boston. The ones who come off looking really stupid are the
three biggest companies in the movie -- IBM, Xerox, and HP.
The movie skipped over the (probably boring) pre-GUI middle history of PCs and
Apples when text ruled the world. Funny that Commodore wasn't even mentioned
though at one time they were killing Apple and IBM in the home market.
So anyway a good movie that, although it hails Apple's technology as the second
coming rather than simply a good idea whose time had come, pretty accurately
reflects how we feel today about the PC industry. The movie's pronouncement of
Bill Gates as the victorious Big Brother is probably premature.
-Ian.
Tim Byars wrote:
>
> Did anyone watch this last night on TNT? And if so what are the opinions?
>
> Tim
> --
>
> "If at first you don't succeed, come back and we'll beat you again."
> - Degeneration X
>
> <>tbyars@earthlink.net <>
--
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