Reviewed: Pirates of Silicon Valley

As a sort of amateur historian of the early days of the personal computingrevolution, I was looking forward to TNT's "Pirates of Silicon Valley,"which debuted last weekend. But unlike many critics, including such industryluminaries as John Dvorak and New York Times' Stephen Manes, who complain ofhistorical inaccuracies and literary license, I found the two-hour treatmentto be reasonably accurate given the limitations of time and the medium. Youhave to remember that TV, by definition, condenses complex story lines intodigestible bites. And the audience for this show is not dedicated PC buffssuch as myself but rather the average viewer.

On that note, I have a few complaints.

First, the accuracy issue: We can easily pick apart the small historicalproblems, such as Gates and company traveling to Florida to sell MS-DOS toIBM when, in fact, the opposite occurred (IBM approached Microsoft; but notfor the OS originally). And the whole Macintosh introduction was an awfulcompression of time, where we're led to believe that Windows--which wasstill almost two years away from shipping at the time--was secretly unveiledbackstage so that Jobs could find out that Gates had lied to him. It justdidn't happen that way. I could keep going, but you get the idea.

The biggest problem with "Pirates of Silicon Valley" is its fixation onSteve Jobs, who is both praised and demonized in this TV movie. Jobs, whowas portrayed almost perfectly by ER's Noah Wyle, was infamous for his abuseof employees during his early days of Apple. If anything, his portrayal inthe movie is somewhat kind, given the reality. But to reduce Gates to thebit player he is in this story is somewhat misleading: Microsoft contributedto the design of the Macintosh's original system software and developed thefirst application software that mattered for the fledgling system, thushelping to usher in the age of graphical computing. And though Windows wasclearly an attempt to bring the Mac's friendly face to the PC, the storyisn't that simple: Gates offered to cede the OS market to Apple in the late1980's if Apple simply agreed to license their OS to other hardware makers.Apple declined, forcing Microsoft to continue with Windows and, at the time,an MS-DOS follow-up called OS/2.

And maybe that's the real problem with this movie: The truth is so much moreinteresting. When it comes down to it, a far more compelling story for thisgeneration would have involved the rise of the Internet, not the PCindustry. It's been suggested to me that an A&E Biography series would havebeen more compelling and I almost have to agree. But it wasn't horrible: AsI mentioned previously, Wyle is an amazing Steve Jobs and Anthony MichaelHall deserves kudos for his depiction of Gates. The problem with the Gatescharacter in this movie just isn't Hall's fault, as he was the victim oflackluster screen-time. Side-kicks such as Steve Wozniak and Steve Ballmerwere poorly cast and inaccurately portrayed, sadly, and their use asnarrators was misguided since neither person was present at most of theevents depicted in the movie.

The heck of it is, I actually liked it. If I had to rate it, I'd probablygive it three out of five stars. Of course, I welcome any attempt at sortingout the early history of the PC industry: I've read every book I can findabout this topic, some several times, and I'm a huge fan of Robert X.Cringely's two "Triumph of the Nerd" serials, despite the fact that theyfocus too much on people close to Cringely who were bit players in therevolution. But criticism comes easily, and I think we need to cut "Piratesof Silicon Valley" some slack. It's decent entertainment, aimed at anon-technical crowd. If you can overlook the historical inaccuracies (whichwouldn't be obvious to most people anyway), and focus on the broader themes,I think you'll get a kick out of it.

--Pau