The movie is about the competition between Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computers(played by Noah Wyle) and Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft (played by Anthony Michael Hall). The movie shows the contribution of these two gentlemen in the development of the two computer companies during their college life. Moreover, the film shows the rivalry of Jobs and Gates and their ideas towards the development of the personal computers.
In the movie, Jobs and his buddy Steve Wozniak invented a computer and with that they’ve earn money. Soon , the Apple Company became a booming company. Meanwhile, Bill Gates and his buddy Paul Allen bluff their way into creating an OS for the newfangled machine – the Altair. Then they bluffed their way into licensing DOS to IBM. Soon, Gates and Allen also earned money but not as much as Apple Company. Apple steals the Graphical User Interface from Xerox’s PARC labs, then Microsoft steals it from Apple. For me, that’s the idea why the movie was entitled as “The PIRATES of the Silicon Valley”. Silicon Valley refers to the area of the Northern California where computer development of 1980’s and 1990’s surged.
The story of the movie doesn’t only revolved in the works of the two gentlemen but also in their lives. Steve Jobs is adopted and he faces many difficulty issues because of his lack of self-identification as a result of the adoption. He sees himself as a creative and imaginative, an artist and one who “can change history”, and yet is uncertain to tale responsibility for the illegitimate child he brings in the world. On the other hand, Bill Gates is illustrated as the typical computer nerd, who leaves a Harvard education to start Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen. He is shown as driven, an opportunist who will stop at nothing to get the idea out there “first”.
