
When the Steve Jobs movie came calling - timdierks
http://scottknaster.blogspot.com/2015/10/when-steve-jobs-movie-came-calling.html
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peter303
I was at two seminal Steve Jobs events- the introduction of the Apple I and
the introduction of the NeXT. The 2nd is in the movie and I have to see if it
is accurate. From videos, he was more polished in the 2000s than 1980s.

~~~
dang
Wow, can you tell us more? How did you come to be there and what do you
remember? I'm sure many people here would love to read about this.

~~~
peter303
The NeXT introduction was classic Steve.

I had a post-graduate Stanford job 11 years later. And had been a certified
Mac Developer using ObjectPascal and all that stuff in the meantime.

Steve was targeting the NeXT for the academic world, so I got an invite. Steve
rented the fanciest auditorium in San Francisco- Symphony Hall (though NeXT
was just off the Stanford campus). No one had seen the NeXT computer yet. Most
PCs up until then were some kind of off-white plastic slabs. When the NeXT was
unveiled it was a dark-gray magnesium cube. (The Borg were still three years
in the future.) The presentation began in a darkened auditorium. Then a
computer screen started talking. It displayed something that looked like a Mac
screen. PC multi-media was still crude then, so audience erupted at the high
quality computer speech. The speech said something about how the new NeXT woud
supercede all previous PCs. Then the light came on with NeXT cube unveiled and
Steve launching into a product speech. Besides the high multimedia
capabilities of the NeXT hardware, Steve also promoted the NeXTSTeP operating
system and software-development kit. It was object-oriented top to bottom,
pretty rare then, save for a few things at Xerox. This was supposed to make
writing educational applications a "piece of cake".

The NeXT never really panned out at universities becasue it was expensive and
slow. I became a certified Objectve-C developer for them too. I remember the
first models taking forever to compile code, because it swapped files onto a
an optical disk. The NeXT became a hit a financial services firms due its
advanced software. Eventually the hardware itself was discontinued and they
just sold the OS and SDKs, which Apple purchases to get into the 32-bit world.

~~~
whatever_dude
Thanks so much for sharing this. The stories may be known but the individual
point of view is priceless.

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wfhorn
Great read! Take a peek too at The Hollywood Reporter's cover story today on
'Steve Jobs' movie and crazy saga to get to premiere:

[http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-widows-
threats-h...](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/a-widows-threats-high-
powered-829925?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=THR%20Breaking%20News_2015-10-07%2009:00:00_nstone&utm_term=hollywoodreporter_breakingnews)

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adricnet
This was an interesting and enjoyable quick read. Thanks for posting the link!

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6stringmerc
Excellent behind the scenes write-up and I really appreciated the tone of
elaborating on all the movie staff/crew doing their bits. Big productions are
big! The fact checking and world making is something I'm also studious about
when working on fictionalization of actual events or trying to establish a
believable world. For instance, my projects include origin of the 14 Los
Zetas, the Enron scandal, rigging the lottery, and others.

That noted, I really wish he'd had a chance to read the script. I'm...not a
fan of Aaron Sorkin's approach to writing, to put it mildly. Time will tell,
but if there's one "Oh, this could've been so much better" potential
criticism, I get the feeling it'll be with Sorkin's material. Hipster cred
claim: I was into Danny Boyle before it was cool.

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m-i-l
Danny Boyle sounds great. A friend of mine actually saw him on the tube a few
weeks back. She had been one of the performers in the London Olympics opening
ceremony which he directed, and saw that he didn't look busy, so went up to
him to thank him for the experience. She said he was really nice, and was on
his way to a film festival[0].

After the Olympics opening ceremony I remember thinking that he deserved a
knighthood for it. And apparently he was offered one but turned it down[1].

[0] [http://www.shufflefestival.com/shuffle-
festival-2014](http://www.shufflefestival.com/shuffle-festival-2014)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declining_a_British_honour#Kni...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declining_a_British_honour#Knighthood_.28Knight_Bachelor.29)

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smackfu
It's interesting to think about how a period piece can be very accurate at a
micro-level, which takes a ton of effort by a lot of craftspeople, but
inaccurate at a macro-level due to a poor screenplay.

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lostgame
I recently found a NeXTCube in the warehouse I live in. Blew my mind.

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declan
The NeXT cube was often faster in perceived UI speed than my 2.3GHz MacBook
Pro (this was after the 68040 upgrade). And the dock was more intuitive
because it could be dragged into your desired position. And application menus
were more useful because they could be detached.

27 years after its original introduction--color came maybe 25 years ago--and
NeXTstep is still looking pretty good.

Ah, nostalgia! I still have a NeXT cube and monitor in my home office.

~~~
mentos
A bit off topic but sometimes I wonder what span of time will have been the
most exciting for humanity. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the silicon
age turned out to be it.

~~~
davnicwil
Veering a little further off-topic: In general I think the rule must be that
for the average human (however you determine that) excitement and enjoyment
levels over a given time window rise monotonically as you slide that window
forwards in time, of course over some minimum size, probably 5-10 years, to
smooth over catastrophic dips such as the most recent global recession.

People (my past self included) always instinctively think that periods in the
past must have been better, freer, more exciting than the boredom and drudgery
of today (all the ideas have been taken, all the frontiers explored, all
theories examined) but in fact this is a line of thought that has persisted
throughout human history (there's a famous quote about Physics being 'done'
from the 1920s which is obviously amusing to think about almost 100 years on)
and even when we think of the people who had it best in history, the kings of
nations even, the average working person in the first world is vastly, vastly
wealthier in many more ways and has more options on what to do with their time
than those individuals could have dreamed of.

tl;dr - life for the average person only gets better, more exciting and more
enjoyable as time goes on! Try to remind yourself of that often, when it seems
like it's not the case, and never take it fore granted.

~~~
mentos
Well I am actually different in that I am jealous of the future but wonder how
much better things can actually get?

Think about the pyramid of human needs from food and shelter to travel and
entertainment.. How much better can food get, how much more enjoyable can a TV
show get after breaking bad? haha

I hope I am wrong but I feel we have achieved 90% in each of the 'categories'.
The last 10% will probably take 90% of the time it too to get here.

~~~
davnicwil
I agree, save for some breakthrough technologies that will be completely
different, like truly immersive VR, robot helpers, good AI, space travel
(where the average person is currently experiencing roughly 0%) I think most
of the fundamentals are very well covered in the year 2015 - over 90% of where
we'd want these things to be, definitely.

I'm inclined to think that now we need to focus more on time, and our
enjoyment of it. At the risk of sounding like an incorrect and broken John
Maynard Keynes record, the next golden age of humanity, and our goal, frankly,
should be a future of plenty where we drive down the _cost_ of these
fundamentals to the point where we have to work a lot less, or even not at
all, to enjoy them as a practically free baseline.

There will always be new toys to 'work' for and the economy (a version of it)
will always keep spinning for those interested in such things, but a future
where good food, shelter, travel, entertainment are free as a base to the
average person is an utter paradise by today's standards - we're not even
remotely close to that - it's attainable only some of the time, and then only
in theory, only by significantly-above-average earners in the richest
countries (by which I mean taking significant periods of time out from work,
and having enough saved that these things are all still attainable).

I'm very jealous of a future where we all achieve that, to be honest. I hope
we do.

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gorena
Am I correct to assume this movie makes no mention of his systematic illegal
wage suppression?

~~~
seiji
The axe grinding machine is in another castle.

~~~
gorena
If American laborers (yes, engineers, you are laborers) still remembered how
to sharpen axes, maybe that would happen less.

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-
work...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/05/air-france-workers-
storm-meeting-protest-executives-job-losses-paris)

~~~
r0naa
What a terrible example to support a very valid point.

What those union workers have done was unacceptable, and made me sick to my
stomach. Also, I felt greatly ashamed - like many other french citizens - by
the french government's weak response to this public humiliation.

Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should
_never_ take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore,
France is a modern democracy and allowing Unions to grow unchecked was a
histoical mistake.

There are a balance to strike between workers' rights and corporations'
prerogatives. France is the very situation you want to avoid, one where an
actor has such tremendous power that any attack to the status quo is
impossible regardless of its benefit for society as a whole.

~~~
coldtea
> _Nobody deserves to be treated this way, and more importantly Unions should
> never take the place of the rule of the law. This is not 1793 anymore_

It's still an era of neo-liberalism and employees return workplaces to
medieval work practices (down to child labor and 14 hour workday) whenever
they can get away with it.

~~~
r0naa
And they can get away with it only because their unions have created
precedents where they create avoc in the streets of Paris with the complicity
(or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the time.

This is sickening really. I am always dumb-founded when I read people who
would like this kind of dystopia for their countries. Don't you see how fucked
up this is for everyone?

~~~
coldtea
> _And they can get away with it only because their unions have created
> precedents where they create havoc in the streets of Paris with the
> complicity (or thanks to the weakness) of the political leaders of the
> time._

And why NOT (ocassionally) create havoc in the streets of Paris? Because it
disrupts business as usual and results in some small scale damages and such?

France and Paris, especially, has a long history of championing people's
rights with street protests. From the Bastille day, to the Commune all the way
up to May 68 and beyond. Tons of things we take for granted would be illegal
without such ocassional "havoc".

People that think that protests and demonstrations should be "a thing of the
past" because now "we live in a full democracy" are just repeating what has
been said all the way from the 19th century -- even if blacks had no rights,
women had no rights, gays had no rights, there was no social security,
immigrants had (and still don't) rights, etc.

Democracy is not some magic thing that solves from within the parliament.
Especially the mockery of democracry we have (with representatives elected
once every 4 or 5 years based on a platform that bundles all issues together -
so if you agree with them on X and disagree on Y you can't get to vote
individually on those things), with political influence bought by corporations
and big players, and without being held accountable for not keeping on their
promises (you just get not to vote for them at the end of their term).

Democracy needs active citizen participation, and protests and demonstrations
are one such method of making people's opinions heard.

