23 May
2020
23 May
'20
11:28 p.m.
Yes, there will always be discrepancies.
I have to admit that many/most?/all? of my memories may be inaccurate or
wrong.
Some don't matter; some can be enough to ruin a good anecdote; some create
a different story.
I'm saddened that Jim Adkisson and Don Massaro of Shugart have changed
their story and now deny that the size of the 5.25" disk was based on Dr.
Wang pointing to a bar napkin. The "Bar Napkin Disk" was a GREAT
anecdote; now ruined.
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2013/05/102657925-…
Whether Jobs saw the Apple1 after it was finished V had worked on it seems
pretty big, but might not necessarily really be, since they HAD worked
together on other projects around the same time.
Whether Gary missed the meeting, or was late for it will matter to some
people. To Gary, it might not have mattered much, but to the IBM people,
EITHER is inexcusably disrespectful. Gary's wife was quite capable of
handling everything that needed to be done (although the IBM suits likely
didn't see it that way - women in authority was contrary to their culture
at the time). A comment by Gary of let them wait in the living room like
any other customer seems in character with Gary's personality, but would
enrage certain IBM types.
There was certainly significant culture clash. Whether it was solely
Gary's casual and informal attitude to business relationships, or whether
it was the IBM people SHOCKED by the casual and informal business behavior
and attire and unable to consider doing business with such a "hippy"
doesn't surprise me.
I had dealings with similar culture clashes around that time. Maybe I'm
just still pissed off about how my uncle, who was an IBM suit, used to be
extremely obnoxiously unpleasant about my having a beard. Was I the ONLY
programmer without a crew-cut and not wearing a suit and tie at all times?
To me, the culture clash aspect makes it one of the greatest stories of
the time.
Was Gary not taking the meeting seriously enough to be there on time, and
as a consequence, ending up being $80B behind Bill Gates, the stupidest
mistake anybody has ever made?
Or the bravest thing that anybody has ever done to stand up to them and
put refusal to be subservient ahead of the money by deciding that the men
from IBM did not deserve different treatment than other
customers?
It might be excusable if the film makers chose to downplay that, or even
not mention it (which they didn't), but to replace it with a grossly
untrue "historical lesson" reversing and incompatible with the truth is
not excusable, and incompatible with the spirit of the story.
Either way, changing it from IBM not wanting to deal with DR into Bill
Gates cold calling IBM to tell them "what an operating system is" is
totally invalidating, marginalizing, and misrepresenting a significant
aspect of the microcomputer culture, and the people who made it. (AND is
ridiculously insulting to the IBM culture to state that they didn't know
what an operating system is!)
The gratuitous fourth wall "Study this, because this is the way that it
really happened" finally took it COMPLETELY out of the realm of
"differing memories", "artistic license", and "improving the
narrative"
(all of which have a place) into gross misrepresentation.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com
On Sun, 24 May 2020, Jecel Assumpcao Jr via cctalk wrote:
Fred Cisin advised on: Sat, 23 May 2020 20:29:28 -0700
(PDT)
But, read carefully the corrections that others
made!
Some things are easy to check, like the fact that the Z80 came out in
1976 when Woz was already finishing the Apple II so he couldn't have
considered using it for the Apple I. Note that this correction doesn't
really add anything to your nice history and I am only using it to
illustrate the general topic.
People's memories are complicated. I used to tell people a story from
1983 about something I did. But around 2010 I found a text I had written
in 1989 and it had a very different version of what happened. While my
current memory is the same as in 2010 I have to trust that my 1989
self's memory was more correct. That is a good rule to follow, though
sometimes I learn things that change how I remembered something so that
the new memories are the more accurate ones.
A good example is the Gary Kildall and the IBM guys story that you
mentioned. Gary claimed that though the meeting was delayed by the NDA
thing, it eventually started without him since his wife took care of
100% of the business side of DR. Then he arrived and was able to discuss
the technical side. The IBM people remember the meeting not happening at
all and not talking to Gary. How is this possible? Was one of them
lying?
I recently saw a very old interview with Steve Jobs. The reporter asked
what had been his reaction when he first saw the Apple I. Steve claimed
the question didn't make sense because he and Woz had come up with the
computer together. He was lying, but more to himself than to the
reporter - in his mind the Apple I was just an evolution of the Blue Box
and he had done that together with Woz (he implied this in his answer).
The reporter was probably aware that when Steve came back from Oregon
and saw the working Apple I a bunch of people had seen it before him at
previous meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club. But if you make a movie
based on Steve's memories you get stuff like him dragging a reluctant
Woz (who drops the machine due to dragging his feet) to a Club meeting
so people can see it for the first time and buy it.
All this supposes that people want to get it right. If they are creating
entertainment "inspired by true facts" then the rules are totally
different. "Pirates" reframed stories of Woz and Bill Fernandez as being
with Woz and Jobs instead to make it less confusing to the public, for
example. "Micro Men" makes the Proton prototype work the second before
the BBC people walked in the door, and not a few hours before like in
real life that wouldn't be as dramatic.
As long as the spirit of the story remains, I can put up with stuff like
this. Unlike in "The Imitation Game" where a key element of the story is
that nobody involved ever told what they had done even to their spouses
until the UK government itself unclassified it. So to have the "book
ends" of the movie be Alan Turing casually narrating the whole story to
a random policeman is absurdly against the spirit of the story. The
fourth wall thing for the IBM meeting in "Pirates" is another movie
ruining scene for me.
-- Jecel