BillFernandez
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Early Apple employees comment on 'Jobs' movie
Jobs, this year's non-comedy Steve Jobs biopic, opened in theaters today. The film stars Ashton Kutcher and follows Jobs from his humble college days through his rise, fall and eventual return to power at the company he helped found. Reviews have been mixed on the film itself, but how do the people who were there at the beginning of Apple react to the film? Early Apple employees Daniel Kottke and Bill Fernandez spoke with Slashdot's Vijith Assar about what Jobs got right, and wrong, about their time with the company. Kottke worked with Apple on hardware, while Fernandez was a part of developing user interfaces for the company. Of the two, only Kottke has actually seen the movie, which he worked on as a script consultant. For his part Fernandez says he sees the film as a work of fiction and has no desire to see history reworked. So what did the filmmakers get wrong? The portrayal of Steve Wozniak. According to Kottke, this scene involving Jobs convincing Wozniak that home computers are the wave of the future while walking through a Hewlett-Packard garage "rings false." The complaint that people would rightly have about the film is that it portrays Woz as not having the same vision as Steve Jobs, which is really unfair. Woz's reply this morning was, "If I see it at all, I'm going to have to see it alone." The film also heavily dramatizes Wozniak's exit from Apple, a scene that Kottke sees as one of the film's best even though it has no basis in reality. Kottke says "that was a complete fabrication."
