There's a scene in
"Pirates of Silicon Valley"
in which a cigarette-smoking Hewlett-Packard executive turns
up his nose at Steve Wozniak and his shabby-looking little
Apple I prototype. "A computer for ordinary people?" sneers
the bewildered exec. "What on earth would ordinary people
want with computers?"
In current tech society, it's one of
those scenes that have ascended to the level of high
mythology: A demigod descends to earth to offer up his
discovery to humanity; but stone-blind mankind, stumbling
through the darkness, wouldn't know fire even if Prometheus
stomped into its office and plunked it down on the desk. In
the upscale watering holes of Silicon Alley and Multimedia
Gulch, people now roll their eyes when talking about how
poor, dumb HP passed up the chance to lead the PC
revolution. ... duh!
But where was HP coming from when it
turned down the Woz's brainchild? In the summer of 1977, the
Apple II. It cost $1,300 -- a fortune at the time. Most
computers were located in the basements of big companies, and
they didn't seem to do very much, except blink their lights
and put accountants and typesetters out of work.
The Apple II, though, was different. This
was a personal computer, and it could do all sorts of
things. But could it answer questions, like the main
computer on board the Starship Enterprise? Well, no. In
fact, the only way to get the Apple II to do anything
remotely interesting was to program it yourself, using
arcane symbols. And that required being good at higher math
-- which most people weren't. And so most ordinary people
stayed away from computers for a very, very long time.
The executives at HP had their heads
screwed on OK. It isn't that the portrayal is untrue -- HP
did blow it -- but, like most historical dramas, "Pirates of
Silicon Valley" is a movie concerned more with vivid,
colorful myths than with the subtleties of truth.
What actually happened was that in March
1976, the Woz brought his invention around to his supervisor
in HP's Advanced Products Division. The super was impressed
enough to contact the company's other divisions to gauge
their interest. You can imagine the calculations that went
on in the minds of HP's decision makers when they looked at
the prospects for an $800 computer directed at consumers --
people who thought "computer" meant "really smart machine
like the one on board the Starship Enterprise" -- and for
which there were virtually no applications. Given the
realities of building, marketing, and supporting a new and
entirely untested product, dismissing Wozniak's machine was
a no-brainer. Wozniak himself later admitted, "It's not like
we were all smart enough to see a revolution coming ...
There are a million people who study markets and analyze
economic trends, people who are more brilliant than I am ...
None of them foresaw what was going to happen either."
But such complexities aren't part of the
Silicon Valley mythology. They probably wouldn't make a good
movie, anyway. With "Pirates," writer and director Martin
Burke has made a film that repackages the myth of Silicon
Valley -- call it The Man Just Don't Get It -- into
bite-size nuggets for easy consumption. Burke works
The Myth over and over. His first variation is The Man as
HP. Then The Man is Xerox, then IBM, and finally a
self-satisfied and complacent
Steve Jobs himself, who has
been given the shaft by that wily
Bill Gates.
But if "Pirates" makes HP look bad, check
out the treatment of Xerox: Apple's fabled "raid" on Xerox's
Palo Alto Research Center is played as some premeditated
attack by the visionaries on the clueless fools.
At PARC, so the legend goes, Xerox had
literally been squatting on the PC revolution for years.
PARC scientists had come up with an impressive array of
newfangled widgets, built into its Alto and Star computers,
that were designed to make computing easier and more
accessible to non-geeks. These included a detached keyboard,
software that created "windows" on the screen and icons that
could be clicked using a little, wheeled contraption called
a mouse. But the stodgy suits at Xerox HQ just didn't get it
and, the thinking was, they never would.
Enter Steve Jobs. Xerox had made a $1
million investment in Apple prior to the start-up's initial
public offering in 1980. For the privilege of investing in
Apple, Xerox agreed to let Apple employees visit PARC and
take a look at the Alto and the Star. At the end of 1979, a
team led by Jobs made two trips to PARC. In the film,
Apple descends upon PARC like a horde of Visigoths, pirating
away PARC's technology to create the Lisa and, later, the
Macintosh. In turn, Bill Gates and Microsoft filch the
technology from Mac prototypes -- given to Microsoft as part
of a software development deal -- to begin work on Windows.
But accounts vary as to what actually
happened during the raid on PARC. Burke's script has Wozniak
present, while other histories of that famed moment don't
mention him. Regardless of just what occurred in 1979, this
legend of The Man remains one of the valley's most
persistent.
It's easy, 20 years after the fact, to
point the finger at Xerox management, first for never
bringing PARC's PC innovations to market and second for
giving up the farm to Apple. But Xerox made its fortune --
and continues to do so -- by thinking up new ways to handle
paper documents. For Xerox brass to up and spin 180 degrees
in favor of some remote idea of a new and "paperless" office
dreamed up by a bunch of bearded hippies in California was a
lot to ask. Besides, Xerox did profit from its
relationship with Apple; its original $1 million investment
became $17.6 million when Apple went public. Then there's
the irony that some of the wow-'em technologies Xerox PARC
is known for -- like the graphical user interface and the
mouse -- weren't invented at PARC at all, but had been
demonstrated back in the '60s by engineer
Douglas Engelbart.
And although Jobs allegedly got
the import of PARC's innovations -- while Xerox management
had its nose buried in the paper-products business -- this
much-ballyhooed notion of Jobs' insight may be little more
than an invention of Apple PR. As journalist Michael
Malone points out in his book "Infinite Loop: How Apple, the
World's Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane,"
the Mac and Lisa projects were both proposed in the spring
of 1979 and begun in September, a good three months prior to
the raid. Malone also points out that the PARC technologies
had nowhere near the usability of those eventually
incorporated into the Lisa and the Mac, making the
similarities seem almost incidental. In fact, Xerox lost a
lawsuit that accused Apple of infringing on its intellectual
property.
Apple's PR interest in creating and
perpetuating such a myth is subtle, but effective. This
interpretation of history gives us a morality play in which
the virtuous Jobs defeats the wicked Man, not by bullets or
brawn, but by the valley's most prized virtue, brains. Mix
that with a little piracy for sex appeal, and the virtuous
Jobs makes Apple hip.
But even Jobs is not spared in "Pirates."
Having shown both HP and Xerox to be the fool, the film then
fits Jobs into The Man role. How could he not get what Gates
was up to? Director Burke toes the plot line of the Silicon
Valley myth faithfully: w
