Will air next week across Discovery's networks

Entertainment Weekly has revealed that the Discovery network is assembling a documentary on the life of Steve Jobs, co-hosted by Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, the duo behind the popular show "Mythbusters." The documentary will examine Jobs' larger impact both inside and outside Apple, and will feature interviews with early colleagues such as Homebrew Computer Club founding member Lee Felsenstein and Daniel Kottke.

The documentary will also feature several musicians, including Stevie Wonder and Pete Wentz, who will talk about how Jobs' and Apple's innovations impacted their careers. Wonder, who recently praised the Apple co-founder onstage shortly before Jobs' death, will also likely talk about how the iPhone and other devices has made it easier for blind people such as himself to gain access to technology. Other mobile platform lag considerably behind iOS in terms of features tailored to those with disabilities.

According to the report, the documentary will include interviews with John Draper, the software engineer and legendary phone-systems hacker more prominently known as "Captain Crunch," who worked at Apple in the early days and taught many of his hacking secrets to Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Draper went on to develop the EasyWriter software for Apple and other platforms, and is today involved in VOIP technology.

Kottke, an early Apple employee, also accompanied Jobs on his sojourns in India and will talk about the experiences that shaped Jobs in the early days of Apple. Jobs himself made reference to the way that indirect experiences would often play a big role in later life; in a 2005 commencement speech to graduates at Stanford University, he told the story of taking a calligraphy course at Reed College during his brief stay there, and how that class impressed upon him the importance of typography and fonts when the original Mac team were creating the Macintosh.

"Someone once said that to follow the path that others have laid before you is a very reasonable course of action; therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men," commented Savage. "Steve Jobs was an unreasonable man ... he defined entirely new ways of thinking about our lives in the digital space."

The documentary is set to premier on Sunday, October 16th at 8 p.m. Eastern time and will air across the Discovery portfolio of networks in 210 countries and territories. [via EW.com]

by MacNN Staff