How the computer war was won

YOU WANT to know how Bill Gates went from being a Harvard drop- out to the world's richest man? How he vanquished his arch-rival, Steve Jobs, the man who invented the personal computer?

Well, you can't, writes Peter Koenig. Pirates of Silicon Valley, a made- for-TV movie starring Anthony Michael Hall as Gates and Noah Wyle as Jobs, dramatises the true story of how Microsoft and Apple Computers duelled to rule the PC universe in the 1970s and how Gates won in the 1980s.

The film will be broadcast next Sunday, 20 June, on the TNT cable channel. But TNT's owner, Ted Turner, apparently feels there is no interest in the subject in Europe. A spokeswoman for Turner confirms there are no plans to air the film on TNT Europe.

The film may, as writer/director Martyn Burke says, be a fable for our times.

"Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are the true revolutionaries," Burke maintains. "Not the anti-war marchers who were determined to overthrow the establishment."

But this sort of revolution is apparently of no interest to Europeans. TNT sticks to film classics in Europe," the spokeswoman said.