“With the global attention accorded the passing of Steve Jobs in the past month it might seem that after the biography, television interludes and interviews, Time Magazine covers, and more that nothing additional could be said,” Harris Fogel reports for Mac Edition Radio. “At least that is what I thought when I was offered the chance to view a rough cut of a video based on an interview that Robert Cringely did with Steve Jobs for Cringely’s documentary ‘Triumph of the Nerds,’ an epic PBS miniseries about the founding of the personal computer industry.”
“We have seen some edits of the interview, but the master tapes were lost until now,” Fogel reports. “A VHS (somehow this sounds so fitting!) tape survived in the garage of the producer, the only copy of the entire interview, not the 10 minute edit [with which] you are probably familiar.”
Fogel reports, “Is the interview interesting? Is it worth an hour of your time? In my opinion it is an unqualified yes. This is Jobs talking as candidly as you have ever seen him, pulling no punches, from John Scully’s leadership of Apple, to his ecstatic joy over ‘blue boxing’ the AT&T phone system with pal Steve Wozniak.”
Read more in the full article here.
I’ll wait for the DVD – most of us do not live conveniently close to the small handful of theaters that will be showing it.
In the meantime, I’ll dust of my VCR and my taped copy of Triumph of the Nerds.
meant “dust off”
I drove to my local theater this past Thursday to watch it. Oops.
I decided not to camp out.
Every interview, keynote or video footage of Steve that I have watched (and like many here, I’ve been Jobs watching for well over two decades now), the man has left a vastly different picture of himself than what are portrayed by these “biographers”, Cringely (cringe worthily) included. Accidental Millionaire, my foot.
Judging the words straight from the horse’s mouth: Steve Jobs is as articulate, thoughtful, insightful, incisive, prophetic (with the aid of hindsight), technical, thorough, absorbing, arresting, always in the present and in the know, ever on top of his surroundings and matters at hand (as opposed to being high on clichés from some co-CEOs that we all know), etc. as the best of them (if not THE best combining all these traits into one) out there. It often fascinates me to note that the small pauses he sometimes took to collect his thoughts weren’t to search for flowery words of articulation, but rather the merit.
People often asked him on very broad and general subjects (i.e. his view of the future etc.), and he would craft his responses as succinctly and as relevantly (staying on the tech/cloud theme for instance) as it would allow him to speculate the uncharted waters. Sometimes the answers may look diplomatic, inducing yawn in the naysayers looking to expose the jock in nerd’s clothing, but now we seem as they really were–visionary.
That is the essence of the man that’s missing from his bios. In the early days, he seemed to have suffered the same fate as Elvis in that so many pundits couldn’t gauge the real talent past his looks and charisma. And still the fools are searching for clues on why so many have mourned “a flashy rock-star’s” passing.
Elvis has left the building.
Long rant, I had that coming. 😮 )
Maybe. But it was a good rant 🙂
Well said. Interpretation is all we get from pundants and journalists. Mostly a reflection of their own negative perusal traits.
Well said, krquet. You get Jobs far better than 95% of the pundits out there who are always advising Apple and spouting off.
Cringely has been a negative pundit of anything Apple for as long as I can remember. Many times saying something good then panning Apple and Steve for not doing even better.
Sorry, but this sudden jumping on the Apple is great band wagon is just his looking for fame.
Just a thought,
en
Cringely has not been a negative pundit of Apple. What do you base this on? While I’ve not read everything he’s written, what I have written has hardly been negative. Mostly objective and insightful I’d say.
Several writers used the “Cringely” pseudonym before Mark Stephens appropriated it.
I preordered my ticket for a showing this wednesday. I never had anything against Cringely, but when I heard it was his idea to try to make money off these interview tapes, I instantly liked him a lot less. The person who found the tapes wanted to post the videos online for free for fans to see free of charge. Sigh.
Wish it were coming to Portland Oregon.
BitTorrent