Pirates of Silicon Valley

Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) is Martyn Burke's tech-history drama, available to watch online on iFILM. It traces how two cocky college dropouts carved up the future of the personal computer between them.

Noah Wyle plays a young Steve Jobs — barefoot, Zen-obsessed, and willing to steamroll anyone who slows down his vision of the perfect machine. Anthony Michael Hall is Bill Gates, who wins less on charisma than on stubbornness and a knack for being in the right room first. The film cuts between the garage where Apple gets soldered together and the conference rooms where Microsoft quietly picks up whatever isn't nailed down. Characters keep turning to the camera to narrate their own myth, and that trick carries the whole thing. Two heist-like moments anchor it: both men touring Xerox PARC, where the graphical interface gets "borrowed," and the deal that lands DOS on every IBM machine.

Made for TNT and honored with a Satellite Award, the movie later drew praise from Jobs himself for how well Wyle nailed his manner. No effects, no tidy lesson — just two clever, not-especially-likable men dividing up a market for decades to come. If you like stories about business, ambition, and people who never have enough, this one fits. Stream Pirates of Silicon Valley (1999) online on iFILM.