I've made no secret of the fact that I don't like the movie Forrest Gump. The era of the late 60's and early 70's was a really weird time for our country (and much of the Western world): uncomfortable, ugly, deranged, disagreeable, void of reason and sense. Quite a bit like the last decade or so, in fact. Watching Forrest Gump brought all that back, and I appreciated neither the reminder nor what I believe was an attempt to whitewash the times.
You'd think I'd have the same reaction to Pirates of Silicon Valley, which I watched recently, since it deals with some of the same era. But I enjoyed it thoroughly. Here's the descritpion from Eric Hunley's Unstructured.
Pirates of Silicon Valley is a 1999 American biographical drama television film directed by Martyn Burke and starring Noah Wyle as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. Spanning the years 1971–1997 and based on Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine's 1984 book Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer, it explores the impact that the rivalry between Jobs (Apple Computer) and Gates (Microsoft) had on the development of the personal computer. The film premiered on TNT on June 20, 1999.
Two things made this a movie I would enjoy watching again. One is that it shows the good, the bad, and the ugly of that era without either oversensationalizing it or making excuses. The Promethean heroes who brought the power of computers to Everyman were severely flawed, but they were still heroes.
Even more than that, I loved the movie because it brought back good memories, especially at the beginning. The early days of computing were messy, but they were also exciting. I still remember sitting in a small room at the University of Rochester's Goler House, listening to Carl Helmers expounding on the wonders of the Apple 1 computer, which he demonstrated using a cassette tape as an input device. Porter and I looked at each other and said, "I want to buy stock in this company!" Unfortunately, Apple was not publicly traded then, and when it did go public, we were out of the loop and missed the IPO of $22/share and the chance to turn $1000 into $2.5 million. (My father did the same thing when he chose to buy our first house instead of investing the money in Haloid, as recommended by a friend who had just visited the company. Haloid later became Xerox.) We didn't get rich, but we did enjoy being on the fringes of the wild-and-woolly frontier.
I, too, disliked Forest Gump.
