Pirates of Silicon Valley

I watched Pirates of Silicon Valley from a copied CD.

That detail belongs to the experience as much as the film does.

A friend had given me a disc containing the kind of collection common at the time: software, drivers, songs, documents, utilities, a few photographs, and films with filenames that served as recommendations. There was no elegant library interface. You opened folders and discovered whatever another person had decided was worth carrying.

One evening I found Pirates of Silicon Valley among those files.

The video quality was poor. The monitor was small. I sat too close to it.

The subject was irresistible.

Apple and Microsoft had already become facts of life by the time I knew their names. Windows was not a risky idea; it was the environment through which I understood a computer. Apple was a company, not an uncertain group of people trying to persuade others that personal computers mattered.

The film pushed those names backward into a period when none of the outcomes were guaranteed.

I loved that.

Technology history becomes dangerously tidy after success. The winning product appears destined to win. The failed product’s weaknesses seem obvious. A visionary looks visionary because we already know which prediction came true.

People living through the period had no such advantage.

They were guessing.

That may be the most useful thing the film gave me. Personal computing was not handed down by History fully assembled. It was improvised by ambitious, competitive, persuasive, occasionally difficult people making decisions with incomplete information.

The film also damaged a comforting engineering belief: that the technically superior idea should naturally win.

History has no such obligation.

Distribution matters. Price matters. Compatibility matters. Timing matters. Contracts matter. Sometimes simply being in the room when another company needs a solution matters enormously.

An elegant technology can disappear.

A limited one can become a standard.

This is disappointing if you want the world to behave like a benchmark.

Watching younger versions of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs also altered their scale. By the time I knew them, they were closer to institutions than ordinary people. The film returned them, however imperfectly, to rooms where they had to convince someone of something.

Young people making bets.

Making mistakes.

Recognizing opportunities.

Occasionally taking things.

That last part explains the title.

Ideas in computing have always moved strangely between invention, borrowing, improvement and appropriation. Interfaces, programming concepts and business models migrate. The line between learning from something and taking it is often disputed most passionately after money arrives.

When the film ended, I ejected the copied CD and laughed at the arrangement.

A film about rivalry, ownership and the birth of personal computing had reached me through a disc of copied files passed informally from one computer owner to another.

There was something historically appropriate about that.

Messy.

Unofficial.

Shared.

Sitting on a desk.