A couple of posts ago I mentioned how excited I was about the upcoming movie The Social Network, and how much I'm looking forward to the dramatization of the founding of Facebook. On that post I also embedded a short clip from the 1999 movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, which was about the (now) early days of the Mac vs. PC wars. The specific clip dramatized the time in 1980/81 when Microsoft sold its operating system, DOS, to IBM.
Here's another clip from the film. This is near the very end of the film, and it dramatizes the Apple release of the Macintosh, which happened just a few months before Microsoft unveiled Windows, its graphical interface for DOS that looked VERY much like the Apple Macintosh operating system. VERY MUCH. So much so that Steve Jobs (played by Noah Wiley in the clip) is a little upset.
As with the first clip, here's another example of where being first or even being best isn't necessarily important in the computer industry--knowing how to leverage, promote, and sell a product IS. The actor playing Bill Gates says as much right at the end of the clip.
As far as I know, neither of the meetings in this clip actually happened, at least not the way they're portrayed here (Bill Gates, though, DID appear at the keynote address when the 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad aired). But that's okay--writers of docudramas often use a little bit of dramatic license, and I think that what's happened here, and I also think it doesn't necessarily hurt anything--the gist of everyone's feelings during the time is captured pretty well here.
(I can't see the video.)
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