[HN Gopher] Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus
___________________________________________________________________
Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus
Author : gammarator
Score : 449 points
Date : 2021-01-26 03:42 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bits.ashleyblewer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bits.ashleyblewer.com)
| bishnu wrote:
| If you enjoy this series I really recommend reading The Soul of a
| New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It's 40 years old but still the best
| book I have ever read about what motivates engineers (not
| entrepeneurs - there are tons of books about that - but rank-and-
| file engineers).
|
| Actually, the first season of H&CF cribs a _lot_ from the book
| (from the overall plot to a few very specific anecdotes).
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| As others have also mentioned, the biggest sin the show commits
| is having the main characters invent so much. It's certainly not
| unknown for a person or a group that innovate in multiple fields
| but for them to innovate in so many was a bit of a stretch but
| one that was acceptable for storytelling purposes.
|
| An alternate could have been to fade characters in and out over
| the seasons. Joe and Gordon are the stars of the PC-clone season,
| with Cameron and Donna playing supporting roles. In the Online
| Services season, Cameron and Donna step forward while Joe and
| Gordon become secondary characters and characters such as Yo-Yo
| and Tom increase their presence. Season three could have had
| Cameron and Donna fall back to secondary characters while Yo-Yo
| and Tom became the main characters in creating a what would
| essentially be something like Sierra Online or Electronic Arts.
| Each season could have introduced a new period of tech and
| introduced new minor characters that would be the center of the
| next season. For continuity, the common thread in all of the
| companies could have been Boz, moving from company to company in
| a sales and business development role.
|
| This way the show could have continued on though to present day
| and even taken a branch here and there during periods of higher
| than typical innovation. The big downside is that you end up
| rotating out some very talented actors. All of the main cast of
| the show as filmed were really good and it would have been a
| shame to lose that but the storytelling would have been better
| for it.
| [deleted]
| bishnu wrote:
| I don't think it is. Most popular, groundbreaking technology
| isn't the first version of itself. Eg, I think of this profile
| of Tony West: https://www.wired.com/2000/12/soul/
|
| Tony West is the protagonist of The Soul of a New Machine by
| Tracy Kidder, the account of Data General creating a new
| microcomputer in the 80s. The first season of H&CF borrows
| heavily from it. He was ahead of the curve on a lot of things -
| laser printers, computers, laptops, thin clients...but never
| had the ability to bring it all to market in a meaningful way.
|
| The tech industry is full of people like this - people that can
| build the future but not sell it. I didn't find it unrealistic.
| prepend wrote:
| The way I look at it is that tech frequently has people
| inventing the same approach over and over. So this actually
| happens, just it's not always the version that takes off.
|
| Sometimes I shrug when someone says "I invented Facebook in
| 1990." But sometimes that happens, although people don't
| normally talk about it in public.
|
| I've worked with co-workers who "invented" aspect oriented
| programming, Jenkins, ajax, nosql sui generis. A few years
| later in each case I remember thinking "oh yeah this is what
| John Doe" was building.
|
| So I just chalked this up to people in this company "inventing"
| mobile computers, dial-up communities, and portals at the same
| time as compaq, prodigy, and yahoo.
| vidarh wrote:
| I think that makes sense. This is a story about people who
| are reasonably successful but they keep never making it truly
| big.
|
| If anything, having a big breakout success is so rare that
| "almost succeeding" many times is a lot more common.
|
| It sucks - e.g. I was part of building a tablet years before
| the iPad (we were not first, either, and not the last pre-
| Apple attempt) - but after a couple like that you get used to
| it and learn from what the successful attempt did different
| instead of being annoyed at it.
|
| And then you try again with something else.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Arguably, Apple also built a tablet years before the iPad:
| the Newton MessagePad in 1993.
| jecel wrote:
| Note that the 1987-1990 Newton was a lot closer to the
| iPad before it was completely redesigned:
|
| http://www.byrdsight.com/apple-newton/
| vidarh wrote:
| There were a lot of similar pen-based PDAs and tablet PCs
| released around the same time as the Newton. Though I
| think all of them were as commercially unsuccessful as
| the Newton. E.g. the Amstrad PenPad. The Newton was not
| really something people compared to, though - it got
| compared more to PalmPilot and similar PDAs. It makes
| sense to put it in the mix of precursors, by all means,
| but at the time people didn't really draw that parallel.
|
| The "second generation" tablets were very much treated as
| a separate category from Newton, PalmPilot, PenPad etc.
| on one hand, and Tablet PCs on the other hand, in that
| they tended to be built around internet connectivity and
| browsers as more important even that portability (you
| were expected to use them around home or the office), and
| with media consumption as an essential element. The
| marketing assumption was that people would have a PDA for
| work, and tablets would be media devices that were
| largely separate things.
|
| The second generation devices, including ours, and
| Ericssons, and a number of others, flawed in that they
| were still too low res (though much better than the
| "first generation" like the PenPad or Newton), too
| expensive, and too slow to be attractive for anything but
| techie early adopters, and with abysmal battery lifetime
| which meant they couldn't compete with the PDAs, and you
| were basically chained to home. This was also before wifi
| was widespread, and various alternatives were still
| competing for the wireless space - e.g. ours had a data
| extension to DECT.
|
| Apple's greatest stroke of genius with respect to the
| iPhone and iPad wasn't primarily technical, but to
| recognise that it was too early and the hardware wasn't
| up to it, and wait instead of releasing a sub-par
| product. "Everyone else" launched tablets as the next
| step after PDAs around '99-'05 or so, didn't get any
| traction, and gave up or failed and then a lot of us
| subsequently laughed at Apple, because "everyone knew"
| something like the iPhone even wouldn't work.
|
| That's not to say I assume we'd have competed if we'd
| waited, but we'd at least had a much better shot. There
| was a very distinct failure to understand the gap between
| the quality that was exciting to a tech audience vs. what
| would be exciting to a wider market... That was a very
| useful lesson.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| Your approach might work for the tech-oriented audience
| members, but the character development and ongoing drama is
| what makes the show appealing to people who don't care about
| the tech. It's part of what makes the show brilliant.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| Back in the 80's my brother and I would type in programs from a
| computer magazine called "Compute's Gazette" which was mainly for
| the Commodore 64. I remember typing in a variant of code that was
| similar to assembly (they coined it MLX), and included checksums
| at the end of each line to make sure we typed it in correctly. We
| spent many hours typing it in and playing these "lite" games.
|
| https://kotaku.com/load-great-memories-8-1-5930961
|
| https://archive.org/stream/1983-12-compute-magazine/Compute_...
|
| I have to admit I really miss the days of being able to type in a
| game from a book (meh.... not really).
| prepend wrote:
| I remember doing this from Byte magazine, or at least I think I
| do.
|
| I didn't have a hard drive so I would spend all day typing in
| the program, run it and lose it when the computer shut down. I
| remember being mad when my sibling would turn off the computer
| unexpectedly.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > typing in a variant of code that was similar to assembly
|
| And in case you didn't have a disk drive, the magazine included
| the BASIC source code listing of the program that you had to
| type _those_ programs into.
| jhbadger wrote:
| While there were interesting things about the show, like how Joe
| manipulated Gordon and others much like many stories of how Steve
| Jobs acted, there were just so many inaccuracies that annoyed the
| hell out of me. For example, the C64s were shown to have C:>
| prompts like DOS machines, probably because the set designers
| thought that all "old" computers worked that way and were too
| young to actually know the era.
| ido wrote:
| My favorite is at some point in the last season they show a 286
| booting up with more than 16mb RAM (the real world maximum that
| CPU supports). I can't help but think this is an intentional
| easter egg.
| nwsm wrote:
| I liked the first season a lot but got kind of annoyed when they
| started just having the main characters invent basically
| everything from tech history.
|
| That being said, I had a good time watching with my mom who is
| also in technology, and getting her insights on the references
| and depiction of 80s tech. She thought it was/is very well done.
| minhaz23 wrote:
| im happy this is getting more attention and a discussion now, i
| looked at it friday night and it had no discussion or upvotes
| just bad timing i guess but i was blown away by how well thought
| out and executed the authors work is, thank you for bringing it
| to others' attention. i hope they get some use out of it, i
| definitely got inspiration from it
| dualboot wrote:
| That this show never had a single Emmy nomination is an absolute
| crime.
|
| The ensemble cast was phenomenal. They delivered believable,
| vulnerable, and often completely frustrating performances.
|
| I'm a sucker for period character-driven drama and there are few
| shows that do it as well as HACF did.
|
| I was drawn in by Lee Pace and my extreme nostalgia for the early
| days of PC computing. I stayed because I fell in love with the
| characters.
|
| You can pick apart the technical side of it all day(jwz did _)
| but you would entirely be missing the point, at least in my
| opinion.
|
| _ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/11/if-only-i-knew-it-was-so-si...
| danso wrote:
| Very nice. Built on Jekyll, apparently:
| https://github.com/ablwr/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus
| ablwr wrote:
| Ya! Although extreeeeeemely kludgy, I did so many hacky things
| -- definitely could not be used as a template for anything else
| and is a bit weird/embarrassing. I'll pretend it's an homage to
| the 90s web even though it's actually just laziness. ;)
|
| I initially started with GatsbyJS/React, but it was stopping me
| from getting to what I needed to do (CSS + content). So even
| though I was going to start with full JS, it ended up JS-free
| (I don't use any trackers), which also saved me from having to
| jump through the right hoops to be more accessibility-friendly!
| stevecalifornia wrote:
| I have watched all four seasons seven times.
|
| This show is so good I don't recommend it to my friends because
| I'm not sure I could handle it if they didn't like it as much as
| myself.
|
| If you haven't seen the show, watch season 1 episode 1. If you
| don't like it, this isn't your show. You don't have to invest 20
| hours of your life 'to get to the good season'. It's all good
| right from the start.
| yumraj wrote:
| I loved the first time I watched it. However, when I started
| watching it again, I could not - while I absolutely loved the
| show, it always left me a little sad for them..
|
| I may have to try again..
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Same here. I made it part of the way through season one a
| second time but lost my patience for most of the relationship
| drama. It was fine the first time through, so I don't think
| it was a poor choice to have it in the show, but it does
| reduce its rewatch value.
| psalminen wrote:
| This is one of the few shows where I've hated every main
| character at different times throughout the series. I just
| started my second time through and I'm interest to see if I
| feel the same.
| weaksauce wrote:
| yeah it really is one of my favorite shows out there. really
| great
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Non-spoiler alert: you might just have to grit your teeth and
| hang on through the first few seconds, where the armadillo gets
| run over.
| jonny383 wrote:
| I am amazed people glide through life with skin so thin. It's
| not even real. What's to be offended about?
| pmiller2 wrote:
| TV, music, movies, theater, and books are _supposed_ to
| make you feel something when consuming them. What 's not to
| understand?
| buckminster wrote:
| > TV, music, movies, theater, and books are _supposed_ to
| make you feel something when consuming them.
|
| So we don't need a warning when they do. What's not to
| understand?
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Sometimes those things are unpleasant. Sometimes those
| unpleasant things are not necessary to enjoy the
| production. Again, what's not to understand?
| buckminster wrote:
| So you need a warning whenever art makes you feel
| something other than enjoyment. Now I understand.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I don't think you do, given how I've broken it down to
| below ELI5 levels, and you're still snarking at me, but,
| ok.
|
| Additionally, you are quite wrong. I distinctly recall
| the first time I was ever literally moved to tears by
| music, and it was precisely when the choir sang their
| first note in _A Survivor from Warsaw, op 46_ by Arnold
| Schoenberg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TbFVYbDuVg
|
| Since then, I have been touched by sadness, beauty,
| anger, awe, and many other emotions as a result of
| experiencing art.
| afroboy wrote:
| I didn't quite like the first episode but show got build up so
| quickly to something really good. always last episodes of every
| season were too damn good.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Personally I liked the first episode but all the relationship
| drama later in the season made me stop watching, it felt
| contrived.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I've watched the entire series twice and enjoyed how well it
| portrays the "typical" case of the industry/life -- the one
| where you aren't the 1-in-a-million breakout winner, but rather
| have to find enjoying in the game itself.
| mindcrime wrote:
| I've watched it (all seasons) twice so far and definitely
| expect I'll watch again at some point. It's one of the few
| shows I've ever watched that I feel like was essentially
| perfect. Not too long, not too short, well written, interesting
| characters, just enough nostalgia, and so on.
|
| * _spoiler alert*_
|
| .
|
| .
|
| .
|
| .
|
| .
|
| .
|
| If I could criticize anything, it might be the death of one of
| the major characters. I mean, it was good drama, and definitely
| a heart-wrenching sequence. But almost too much so, if such a
| thing is possible in a drama.
| racl101 wrote:
| The show started off great in the first season but then it became
| harder to believe as it went on that a rag tag group of people
| were at the almost at the forefront of all these technological
| revolutions in computers.
|
| I get that it's fiction but still .... you gotta keep it somewhat
| believable.
|
| It would've been better if, much like Forrest Gump, all these
| revolutions happened in the background but they weren't
| necessarily at the forefront of them.
| larrydag wrote:
| One of the most underrated shows in the last decade. This show
| isn't supposed to be a narrative history of a computer company.
| This show is to encompass the vigor, innovation, power struggle,
| paradigm shift of the 80's and 90's of the computing revolution.
| I was just a kid when all of this began and grew up during this
| era. This show does a great job of showing the excitement during
| that time. Everyone knew back at that time something was brewing
| with technology and it seemed there was something new and
| exciting every month. It was also a battle for supremacy to see
| who was going to lead the revolution. A very fascinating part of
| tech history.
| vages wrote:
| I can't seem to stream this in my country, and the entire series
| is not available on physical media.
|
| Ten years ago, I would have been able to buy this show on
| physical media from abroad. Now, if no streaming provider
| purchased the television show rights, I can't get it. And there's
| not enough purchasing power to produce a physical version of it.
| Isn't this globalization in reverse?
|
| For the record: I live in Norway. Please let me know if there is
| any way to see the series.
| [deleted]
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Looks like only the first two seasons have been published on
| physical media so you're stuck with less than legal methods of
| watching it.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| If you guys liked Halt and Catch Fire, I'd also like to
| recommend:
|
| - Pirates of Silicon Valley (this largely follows Gates and
| Jobs): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
|
| - Micro Men (this is about the British tech scene in the 80s):
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/
| prepend wrote:
| Also Valley of the Boom [0] by National Geographic focusing on
| Netscape, Pixelon, and a couple others.
|
| And General Magic [1] - a documentary about the startup General
| Magic with interviews with early employees who went on to
| Apple, Google, etc
|
| And Silicon Cowboys [2] - documentary about Compaq in the early
| days, pretty much the real story version of Season 1
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Boom
|
| [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/
|
| [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/
| vimy wrote:
| Halt and Catch Fire is an excellent show. I wish Apple would make
| a similar show about the first Macintosh. There's plenty of
| material on folklore.org for a good story.
| the_af wrote:
| Have you watched the (pretty good) documentary "General Magic"?
| If features a lot of the same people than folklore.org, to the
| point one could consider it an Apple "side story", though there
| are also future Googlers and people who built Android.
|
| Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo
|
| I found it interesting. There is a bit of hagiography going on,
| though (and note the trailer seems way more antagonistic
| towards Sculley than the documentary actually is.)
|
| One thing I found striking is that none of these people seem to
| need or care about money. They say so explicitly, "we didn't
| care about the money", and that it was all about the vision and
| passion. Yet somehow they managed to remain clothed and well
| fed. If that's not the definition of privilege, I don't know
| what is!
| thirtyseven wrote:
| Do you trust Apple to make such a show without making it a
| hagiography?
| Apocryphon wrote:
| A hackiography, surely.
| taneq wrote:
| Folklore.org is such a wonderful read, I'd love to see a
| faithful TV adaptation.
|
| I also really enjoyed Accidental Empires (which was later made
| into a documentary, Triumph of the Nerds).
| hardwaresofton wrote:
| If you liked Halt and Catch Fire and the music therein, make sure
| to check out the soundtrack, it's available on bandcamp[0].
|
| I listen to it when I want ~medium to high focus when working,
| and sometimes to get me "in the mood" so to speak.
|
| [0]: https://paulhaslinger.bandcamp.com/album/halt-and-catch-
| fire...
| nickjj wrote:
| Halt and Catch Fire is the only show I ever watched where I
| watched the intro[0] for every episode. The beat is perfect
| with the animation. It being 30 seconds also helps.
|
| [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD_kCKiSkoI
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Speaking of music, while this show has so many amazing things
| going for it, one of the best is the intro sequence and the
| theme music. That puts it on rare footing with shows like _Mad
| Men_ and _Covert Affairs_. I know Netflix puts this button on
| everything, but I never use the "Skip Intro" button on these
| series.
| Foxboron wrote:
| I had to look up the guy that actually designed it, and I
| realized they have pretty much made all the intro cinematics
| I adore from TV shows.
|
| Westworld, American Gods, Man in the High Castle and Halt and
| Catch Fire.
|
| https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/raoul-marks/
|
| https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/halt-and-catch-fire/
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Huh, really. I haven't gotten around to watching _American
| Gods_ , and _Westworld_ isn 't my thing, but I also enjoyed
| the title sequence for _The Man in the High Castle_. It isn
| 't one of the ones I'd watch every time, just because it's
| so chilling, but I do very much enjoy it. The show itself
| was incredible, of course, and also has a bit of a chilling
| feeling to it. It's a perfect fit.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Nice thing about the title sequence for The Man in the
| High Castle is that it doubles as an prologue in setting
| the story. Much nicer than having to read (or have
| narrated) a background story to get things started.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| I loved this show. It made me wish I had gotten into tech much
| earlier!
| aurelius12 wrote:
| So weird. Had just finished s3e4 for the second time through when
| I saw this.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| The world is full of coincidences.
| raybb wrote:
| First time I'm hearing about it. According to Wikipedia the show
| is well loved but just didn't get much viewership.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| fantastic show. For people who like the 80s/90s tech setting as
| well as just a plain good drama.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Wonder if the show was an experiment in hyperfocused
| advertising delivery. What would it be worth to certain
| advertisers to know that Steve Woznick and a dozen other
| billionaire tech geeks would see their ads? The viewership
| numbers weren't great and I was happily surprised to see it
| renewed each season, wondering how AMC could justify the budget
| for something with such low viewership. But maybe the rates
| they charged advertisers were high due to the show being
| narrowly targeted to a particular demographic that's wealthy.
| The rest of us got to come along on the ride mostly for free. I
| seem to remember the show having more advertisements for luxury
| goods than usual for an AMC show.
| imagica wrote:
| It is a captivating show but after watching the first series I
| had to give up halfway through the second. Modern TV shows are
| cool but take too much, I wish I could watch the compressed
| version. After the first series the tropes become quite
| unpredictable and things start taking turns just because they
| need filler.
|
| I grew up in the 80s and this show brought back some memories
| and filled in some gaps. I'd definitely recommend the first
| series.
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Highly recommend continuing to watch it, in my mind it really
| only improves over the course of the four seasons, though I'm
| sure there were some ups and downs. The last couple of
| episodes of the final season did strike me as being bizarrely
| out of touch technologically (for the show, which generally
| got things pretty close to right), but I figured the writers
| were spending more time wrapping up the human elements of the
| show than focusing on getting the technology right.
| rhino369 wrote:
| I'll give an opposite impression. I thought the first season
| was sort of a paint by numbers Mad Men rip off focused on
| tech rather than adverting. S2 gets its own story that is
| very enjoyable.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Honestly, I read the entire first season as a self aware
| meta-commentary on how the show was supposed to take Mad
| Men's place in the AMC lineup but was merely a shallow
| facsimile.
|
| In addition, I see Mad Men's episode "The Monolith", about
| a computer being installed in the office, as a comment on
| the (at that point) upcoming Halt and Catch Fire series.
| hellotomyrars wrote:
| You're pretty much spot on, by the writers own admission.
|
| _At first, "What matters?" was a question the show's
| creators themselves couldn't answer. When Cantwell and
| Chris Rogers wrote the pilot for Halt and Catch Fire, they
| had little in mind but jumping on board one of the shows
| they already liked. "We're both in our early 30s, so the
| shows that made us wanna do this were the great 'difficult
| men' shows: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire," Rogers
| says. "We wrote the pilot in a way that was set up to ape
| them: Joe McMillan is a traditional antihero, and the world
| is organized around him in that way." But when the pilot
| was bought by AMC for production, rather than simply used
| as a staffing script to land "The Chrises" (as Halt's cast
| and crew universally call them) in a writers' room for a
| preexisting series, things changed. "As we got in there and
| started doing it, we had a writers' groove. We figured out
| what was our voice, as opposed to the voice that felt like
| it was emulating the shows we liked."_
|
| https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a47905/halt-and-
| cat...
|
| In many ways it's the opposite of what I feel like happens
| to most shows where they have extensively planned and
| worked on their first season because it's a multi-year
| effort in the making and then when they get renewed (if
| they get renewed) they have to figure out where to take it
| in a fraction of a time that they'd never really planned
| for.
| shawnz wrote:
| I felt similarly and gave up on it after a while, but your
| comment is making me reconsider
| Bayart wrote:
| It got just about the running time it needed. Not too short,
| not too long. In that respect it's a success.
| fossuser wrote:
| It's really great and one of the rare ones that's great until
| the end, and it ends purposefully and well.
|
| My only comment about it is the first handful of episodes are
| the weakest. After the first half of the first season they tone
| down the Joe MacMillan character to be less of a kind of over
| the top trope anti-hero and more of a real character with depth
| and things get better. They're not _bad_ early on, but you 'd
| probably notice that and it's worth watching anyway.
| allenu wrote:
| Thanks for the info about the Joe MacMillan character. I
| watched a few episodes of the first season and could not get
| past him. His character just rubbed me the wrong way. I'll
| give the show another try.
| tompagenet2 wrote:
| I totally agree with this, and it marks the first series for
| me a bit. The setting and concept are great, but Joe is a
| pastiche and until they calm his character down he's not very
| believable. He gets too much screen time and the expense of
| other, better characters. As you say, it's not bad, just it
| hasn't grown into itself. The last series is both excellent
| and poignant. The group always being just a bit too early
| with their ideas creates a sense of innovation but it's also
| tinged with failure which I think really works.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Joe is a pastiche and until they calm his character down
| he 's not very believable_
|
| Whether is was intentional or not, I think the way Joe
| moves into a more "believable" role worked well from a
| character development standpoint. Like, the cookie-cutter
| sales person isn't going to fly in SV (or Texas), and he
| was fooling himself anyway.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| Highly recommend watching it all the way thru. I think it is
| great drama, but to _deeply appreciate_ it, you have to be in
| the industry or know about it -- to realize how accurate the
| show is, and that is a smaller market of viewers.
|
| And w/r/t accuracy, I dont mean technical accuracy but rather
| the characters types, the ups-and-downs of startups, the
| failures, etc.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Because nobody has yet mentioned anything related to the title
| for this series, here's the explanation:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...
| vincent-manis wrote:
| The strange thing is that the "instruction" Halt and Catch Fire
| originated in a joke System/360 "green card" (reference summary)
| from the 1960s, along with Rewind and Break Tape, Execute (or
| Punch) Operator, and many others I've long since forgotten.
| Reference is sometimes made to an undocumented Motorola 6800
| instruction, but the term is from the Big Iron era, and has
| nothing to do with personal computing. It's really from the
| "Blinkenlichts" era, when people commonly put up cartoons in the
| machine room showing a floating-point adder as a snake in a
| birdbath.
|
| By the way, Big Iron's abilities in the physical world were real.
| I occasionally operated a System/360 with 4 2311 disk drives,
| 7.5MB monsters with the form factor of washing machines. When
| running the IBM sort program, these clunkers were apt to move
| around the machine room.
| newswasboring wrote:
| > when people commonly put up cartoons in the machine room
| showing a floating-point adder as a snake in a birdbath.
|
| I really want to see this, can't find it by googling though.
| Maybe you know where to find it?
| vincent-manis wrote:
| The last time I saw that one was in the University of British
| Columbia 7044 machine room, circa 1969. It was part of an
| "Anatomy of a Computer" cartoon, with a number of other
| visual puns. The adder is the only one I remember. Have never
| seen it online, alas.
| cmsefton wrote:
| Interestingly, looking around for this cartoon led me to
| these two specimens showing adders in chip and circuit
| design:
| https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/fulladder.html
| https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/halfadder.html
| rootbear wrote:
| Our CS department newsletter once had cartoons featuring snakes
| illustrating both adders and half-adders, the latter being the
| victim of an ax.
| mindcrime wrote:
| It only just occurred to me that Halt and Catch Fire didn't
| have a scene of a printer catching on fire, as best as I can
| remember. Or maybe it did and I just forgot? That would have
| been classic...
| hoten wrote:
| Nope, but there was the scene at the end of season one where
| Joe does something with fire (avoiding spoilers).
| newswasboring wrote:
| Am I the only one who doesn't like the show? I have seen
| everything upto S4E3 (or somewhere around that), and I must say
| its just horrible people with very few redeeming qualities. Its a
| difficult men show (yes Cameron is also a difficult Man), and I
| get that those are popular with people. But every other show like
| that that I actually like is more... fun. This one is just grim
| and dark and unrelenting in its difficult men tropes.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It's definitely a prestige melodrama which makes it maudlin.
| One could recommend HBO's _Silicon Valley_ as an antidote, but
| that 's a comedy with cynical bittersweet tones. Perhaps one
| day someone will make a tech industry drama that's light and
| optimistic.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Its not just that, the series feels disingenuous. Like
| nothing can go right for the main characters, ever. Whenever
| they achieve something, they have to be knocked down. Never
| once in the series did anyone have a moment of happiness
| which is not punished. Like, as soon as you get your exit
| money, BAM brain problems! Successfully convert a idle
| mainframe into a time share business, NOPE it will be stolen
| from you.
|
| I feel like they are conflating sadness with grit and
| unnecessarily concentrating only on the sad/difficult parts.
| As a counter example, look at breaking bad or better call
| saul. Breaking Bad is perhaps the most successful prestige
| show since Sopranos (I think it might be even more successful
| if only looked at commercially). But the show has fun with
| its universe. Even The Wire, which is a show about everything
| that can go wrong with the city has moment which feel human
| and are not sad/difficult.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Yeah, I'm definitely not a fan of the ways they put them
| through the wringer- Gordon's health issues were a
| particular excessive twist of the knife. Interestingly
| enough, that description sort of describes _Silicon Valley_
| 's trajectory for its protagonists as well. Could it just
| be that showrunners don't know what to do with their
| characters once they find success, especially in the
| potentially extremely lucrative world of tech?
|
| Amusingly enough, I remember this 2015 article comparing
| the two, as well as Douglas Coupland's novel Microserfs,
| when both shows were still on their early seasons:
|
| https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-
| ha...
| newswasboring wrote:
| I think you have something there, but I don't think its
| about knowing what to do its about being interested in
| telling that story. I feel like it takes a lot of skill
| to write a story about a wealthy/successful person and
| prevent the audience from going "boo-hooo, poor you in
| your mansion". But its not like it can't be done, in fact
| I would have to plug both Breaking Bad and The Wire here.
| Both the shows go beyond the point where the initial
| characters achieved success in what they wanted to do.
| Both shows did it by expanding their universe of
| characters and topics. BB added more dangerous men
| Heisenberg can go against and The Wire started looking at
| the same problem from several angles (political,
| financial, etc). The last season even shows what a
| successful drug lord does.
|
| I don't like silicon valley either, and its precisely the
| same issue. They are laser focused on some characters and
| thus suffer from it.
| rand49an wrote:
| Better Call Saul does exactly the same thing as you
| describe though. That show is relentless in knocking Saul
| down despite all his efforts to better his fortunes. But
| sometimes that's how life is.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Better Call Saul does exactly the same thing as you
| describe though._
|
| Breaking Bad does as well. What goes right for Walt? He
| loses everything. Maybe I'm missing something.
| newswasboring wrote:
| Its not about the end. Its about the journey. The way its
| done in HACF seems brutal. Like I can't smile at any
| given moment. [EDIT: in Breaking Bad] the mishaps do not
| feel immediate, don't feel like a punishment. There are
| real moments of victory, which are expanded and
| deliberated upon. In Halt and catch fire I feel like the
| makers are afraid of their characters being happier than
| a day.
| [deleted]
| whoisthemachine wrote:
| Great show, neat idea!
| dusted wrote:
| Loved the show, and this website looks awesome and seems to
| contain a massive wealth of information on computing history,
| bookmarked! Probably my only beef with this show is when he dumps
| the rom using switches and LEDs, sure you could do that, but you
| could also be reasonable, and hook it up to a computer and write
| a lil program to dump it, when you're that smart anyway..
| prepend wrote:
| There's a quote [0] by Lee Pace in the last season that I
| remember as both the best description of the Internet as well as
| explains my love in the mid 90s when I first started using the
| web... " When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we
| went through the Holland Tunnel, and it was basic. Concrete and
| steel. But it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat,
| wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge. It was the
| explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of
| Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of
| the trip the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within
| something that is magnificent and never-ending. This is the first
| Web browser,"
|
| I love this show so much. I worked for a bunch of misses and I
| like seeing a description of the times that were so important,
| but not told by the winners.
|
| [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5707526/characters/nm1195855
| spamizbad wrote:
| I absolutely love this "vintage" web design. The author's page[1]
| is very impressive and I love the atheistic. Wish more creative
| people in the industry would take design risks like this.
|
| [1] https://ashleyblewer.com/
| ablwr wrote:
| thank you so much!! CSS is so good these days, thanks to the
| dedicated and hard work of standards authors. I recommend that
| anyone who has been driven into a blind rage trying to do
| something simple like center divs give CSS another shot now
| that we have CSS Grid.
| mprime1 wrote:
| Then I recommend checking out the Indie web webring
| https://indieweb.org/webring
| __exit__ wrote:
| Really great set of resources! Bookmarked! Also a great companion
| to rewatch the series!
|
| BTW, does anynone know where I could buy the complete series on
| bluray or dvd?
|
| I loved watching the show on TV at its time, but cannot find all
| the seasons to buy and rewatch.
| [deleted]
| libraryofbabel wrote:
| This is a superb set of resources for anyone interested in the
| history of computing in the 80s and 90s. I'd go so far as to say
| it's great even if you don't intend to watch the show (although
| you should!). I wish this had existed back when I was teaching
| history of technology.
|
| One of the best decisions the show made was to set the series at
| a series of fictitious minor companies and startups struggling
| down there in the trenches of the computer revolution without
| ever quite making it big. This avoids the trap of teleology and
| gives you a sense of how things could easily have turned out
| differently. It is why the show is so much better as both
| computing history _and_ drama than all those films about Apple or
| Steve Jobs and the rest that tediously rehash the same stories of
| the winners. (Although one of the main characters, Joe Macmillan,
| has some Jobs-like character features. I do not mean this as a
| compliment.)
| mpalmer wrote:
| You could look at Joe as exploring how Steve Jobs could have
| turned out differently.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Or a Jobs wannabe in a world where Jobs and the Macintosh
| exist.
| jb1991 wrote:
| In this show, Jobs and the Macintosh do exist -- it's a key
| dramatic element of one of the episodes.
| larrydag wrote:
| Also Wozniak and Apple. Netsape/Mozilla and the internet.
| Gates and Microsoft. This show really does bring it all
| to the table.
| DarknessFalls wrote:
| I have never seen such an amazing and accurate depiction of how
| people deal with grief as what this show presents. Beyond the
| computing history aspects of it, which touch upon some esoteric
| but important epochs, the human drama really impressed me by
| season 4.
|
| Who remembers the short-lived Lucasfilm project 'Habitat'?
| Accurately rendered in the show as the interactive social
| network.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| I completely agree. For me, the zenith was season 3, but
| _any_ season of HCF was the closer to catching on film what
| being in a startup is like than any other show I 've seen.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| I really liked the show for many of the things you mentioned. I
| recommend it every now and then to friends or coworkers because
| I haven't met a single person yet who's seen that show. Very
| underrated.
|
| My only gripe was that it seemed in season one, they tried a
| bit too hard to add drama to the show to appeal to a broader
| audience that isn't that interested in the technical stuff.
| Especially Joe Macmillan just felt over the top and just not
| credible at times. They made up for it in season two though,
| adding a lot of back-story for him and making him just more
| consistent in general. But even then, season one is still the
| best imo.
| farias0 wrote:
| I read somewhere that the network was trying to create a new
| Mad Men, which fits a lot with the way Joe McMillian is
| portrayed. Thank god they went the other way: The drama was
| much better with the more relatable characters (the two
| female leads especially), and the technological narrative
| ended up more interesting without a Don Draper-like messianic
| figure involved.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I usually don't really read about the shows I watch, I just
| go with it. So I saw it as Joe needing to get something out
| of his system, and he evolves after that. Though he never
| really stops being Joe. It worked for me.
| GTP wrote:
| I didn't watch (yet) Halt and Catch Fire, but given your
| description, I think you would like Silicon Valley too. There
| the protagonist has a big idea but struggles to make it a real
| product. Also the jokes told there make it both really funny
| and interesting, because there's always something true about
| them.
| noir_lord wrote:
| Have watched both, very different shows but brilliant in
| their own way.
|
| The first season of HCF in particular was spectacular (the
| others are still amazing but for a first season HCF smashed
| it out the park).
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| I completely agree. Seasons 2,3,4 were great, but the first
| one was amazing on how it portrayed the feel of the time,
| the struggle, everything. They could have stopped at season
| 1 and I wouldn't have been disappointed.
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| I DID stop at season 1... Just couldn't get into it after
| that
| prh8 wrote:
| Same here but I might try again
| giuseppeciuni wrote:
| I suggest you to continue watching all others seasons if
| I can give you an advise :). That's right, to me the
| first serie is amazing, by the way the other ones aren't
| bad too. I appreciate in HCF the explanation of a company
| life where problems can happens in any time, fight
| between people and the risks and possibilities to fail
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Agree. I've always wondered that if maybe I'd just been
| born 10 years earlier, if I might have been involved in
| some of this stuff instead of just a kid playing with the
| stuff they made. Watching it was a sort of reverse-
| vicarious experience.
| mths wrote:
| > It is why the show is so much better as both computing
| history and drama than all those films about Apple or Steve
| Jobs [...]
|
| Loved Halt & Catch Fire
|
| Pirates of Silicon Valley was pretty great, no? Idk about its
| accuracy though.
| racl101 wrote:
| Pirates was so great, entertaining, and generally informative
| if you knew nothing about the subject even though it wasn't
| totally accurate. But at the time, what other comedy, drama
| would you find about the history of the personal computer?
| There was literally nothing else like it out there and very
| little else like it since.
|
| I was a teen who knew little about the history about personal
| computers when I first saw it. I had just gotten my Windows
| 95 machine, my first computer and was stoked cause I paid for
| a third of it with my own money from working odd jobs. My mom
| paid the rest.
|
| Anyways, I found the subject matter engaging so I have a fond
| place for that movie.
| dccoolgai wrote:
| The funniest thing about "Pirates" to me is how it was made
| at a time when it seemed Microsoft had "beaten" Apple and it
| showed Jobs learning to accept his defeat.
| dualboot wrote:
| To be fair... Bill has won in the end by most metrics...
| pkd wrote:
| Great work and I am glad this show is building a cult following.
| I consider the later 3 seasons of the show as the third best TV
| series I have seen in the past decade (behind only True Detective
| S1 and Chernobyl). If you have been struggling with the first
| season, consider sticking with it!
| ekianjo wrote:
| Are the series technical or rather vague in that regard? If
| they are, how accurate are they?
| RoyTyrell wrote:
| For TV/film, it's probably one of the most accurate that I've
| seen. There are some things that are obviously for drama and
| visual effect though.
|
| Some examples (very low spoilers but you've been warned):
|
| ------------------------------
|
| ------------------------------
|
| 1. In one of the first episodes, a couple characters design
| up a circuit to step through the values of an EEPROM to read
| off the value of each address. They use a series of 8 LEDs
| and convert the binary value to decimal in their head and
| then write it down on paper. Even if you were going to do
| something very manual like that you would want to use a
| 7-segment LED and driver so you could at least just write
| down the hex value.
|
| 2. One of the characters writes some firmware in assembler,
| and other characters keep saying that their code is
| "beautiful" and "art".
|
| 3. Later on in the series, some of the characters run an
| online game company and run a distributed game server on
| networked IBM XTs. They don't actually say if they're using
| some custom OS or how the accomplished that, but that also
| isn't the point of those episodes either.
|
| 4. There are brief flashes of assembler, basic, and C on a
| computer screen and most of it seems to be at least slightly
| incorrect.
|
| All of that being said, I would give it a B+ for technical
| accuracy - and an A for being an awesome show.
| Ataraxy wrote:
| It's a character study more like Mad Men meets Forest Gump in
| the silicon valley nascent tech startup era.
|
| Personally I think it's better than Mad Men.
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _Mad Men meets Forest Gump_
|
| This is a great description.
|
| > _silicon valley nascent tech startup era_
|
| Even better is that they start in Texas, and _going_ to the
| up-and-coming Silicon Valley is one of the story lines.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| > Even better is that they start in Texas
|
| Which at the time was referred to as the "Silicon
| Prairie". I still remember my Dad working for Control
| Data and he travelled frequently back and forth between
| Minnesota and Texas. I also remember a lot of
| conversations my parents had first about moving to Texas
| and then later moving out to CA when SV really took off.
|
| We never moved, but during those years when tech really
| took off, he was constantly being recruited by companies
| in the valley.
| querulous wrote:
| i found it very accurate technically if not historically. it
| doesn't really linger on the technical aspects though, it's
| very much just used as window dressing
| pmiller2 wrote:
| I found it fairly believable, if not completely accurate,
| in both aspects. Most of the things in the show are things
| that actually happened in real life, just with the serial
| numbers filed off. For instance, Cardiff Electric is
| basically fake Compaq, Comet is basically fake Yahoo!, and
| Rover is like fake Google. There's even a reference to the
| Morris worm.
|
| Sure, fake Google comes a little early in the timeline, and
| Mutiny doesn't exactly map to anything that's familiar to
| me, but it all feels like it could have happened.
| Verisimilitude is really what matters here, and they pull
| it all off to an absolute T.
|
| On the technical aspects, I loved when Donna got to do her
| thing those couple of times and do data recovery on disks.
| I wish they had been able to give her a bigger role in the
| early part of the series, because her character really
| shines when allowed to.
|
| And, we have to mention the set design. It's perfect, right
| down to the little touches, like Donna and Gordon's J.C.
| Penney TV, or the Yars' Revenge poster hanging up in the
| Mutiny frat house. Sometimes I literally watch the show
| just to look at the sets.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Mutiny felt to me like it was PlayNet or Quantum Link,
| the company that eventually became AOL.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| It is a bit hilarious that the main characters, often
| Cameron, end up inventing much of modern computing.
| Mutiny is not only an on-line game network, but includes
| a graphical chat room (proto-social networking), a
| Craigslist feature, and a BBS. But I do appreciate it for
| the sake of the show exploring as many of the aspects of
| those eras of early computing as possible. Even Joe's
| "working for an oil company" plotline in season 2
| reminded me of the time Exxon got into computing:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842547
|
| As far as getting the window-dressing and feel of the
| time right, there's also Netflix's _Black Mirror:
| Bandersnatch_.
| fallous wrote:
| Those aren't anachronisms, they actually existed in the
| 80s and 90s on private online networks.
|
| Real-time chat? Compuserve's CB Simulator. Craigslist?
| Compuserve certainly had classified ads as I'm sure did
| most of the others, including BIX. Usenet/Bullet Boards
| for interest groups? Compuserve Interest Groups, and
| every other service had that as well. Online gaming was
| also available on most of the networks, but special
| shout-out to Air Warrior that ran on GEnie.
|
| You could also purchase airline reservations via SABRE
| which was supported by Compuserve and GEnie, get news,
| stock quotes, etc.
|
| And yes, most of those services started out buying
| timeshare cycles from the likes of oil, insurance, and
| banking companies during evenings and weekends.
| vidarh wrote:
| BBS networks often had on-line games, that often served
| as "proto-social networking". Most of them certainly had
| forums to buy and sell. Many had clients with graphical
| capabilities.
|
| They didn't exaggerate much there - it was a space with
| plenty of competition, to the point that for a lot of
| people the Internet seemed like a boring step down in
| capabilities for some time, with networks like AOL and
| Prodigy believing they could stem the tide and keep
| people walled in.
|
| For my part, before I got internet access, I reinvented a
| bunch of that stuff myself, and worked on a graphical BBS
| client and capability for federation. And there's nothing
| unique in that - I know many others who also did, unaware
| of what existed, and without thinking we invented
| anything new, because they were small, incremental
| obvious steps from what we did know about.
|
| It's simply a natural set of things that people wanted,
| and the limiting factor was not the ideas, but access to
| time, talent and capital and a willingness to go ahead
| and do it.
|
| That's often how these things work. Things get
| independently reinvented all over the place. Not
| necessarily well, or fast enough etc.
|
| And you'll note Cameron is not the only one to invent any
| of the things she does in the series either.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| By "capability for federation," do you mean something
| more than what FidoNet allowed?
| vidarh wrote:
| Ability to establish a live packet network.
|
| Yes, it was basically re-inventing IP for no good reason
| because lack of internet access meant lack of info about
| what already existed...
|
| When I, a few years later, got an internet connection and
| started reading the relevant ISPs, it was pretty annoying
| to see what had already existed.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Interesting. So, basically, it sounds like you had some
| dial-out modems hooked up, and some kind of database of
| other BBS numbers, kind of like a routing table, except
| you basically offloaded the actual routing to the phone
| company? Then, you could call out to the other BBS and
| switch the user's display to show the external BBS rather
| than yours?
|
| If so, that's an interesting idea, but it kind of sounds
| like a good way for your users to run your phone bill up
| rather than theirs, while possibly not even engaging with
| your BBS at all. (For those who aren't familiar, back in
| the BBS days, you had to actually _pay_ for "long
| distance" phone calls. And, "long distance" often wasn't
| very far away.)
|
| Do I have it right, or was it something different?
| vidarh wrote:
| Not exactly. An actual packet network, so the connections
| would be multiplexed just as if you used an IP
| connection, and routed it at like over a dedicated
| network. The modem part is an implementation detail.
|
| In terms of cost, it was normal at the time to charge per
| minute fees for services on the big online services, so
| enabling remote services multiplexed over a network like
| that would be an opportunity for BBS operators to
| federate into a bigger network and gain revenue by
| charging for services, and start out without having the
| traffic to justify a fixed line.
|
| But obviously, just like the big online services, that
| model became unviable the moment the internet went
| mainstream.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| Sure, it's kind of absurd that the same 4 people would be
| at the center of so many technological shifts, over a
| period of 20+ years. But, you really have to accept that
| as a conceit of the medium.
|
| There are basically only two ways to construct a TV
| series that has any continuity to it whatsoever. You can
| either keep most of the main characters together for the
| entire series, and watch them grow and change, like most
| series do; or, you can do like _American Horror Story_
| does and just scrap everything and start anew every
| season or so. Some series don 't care about continuity,
| like _Seinfeld_ , so they fall outside the scope of this
| statement, but, the majority of TV series will be one or
| the other of these.
|
| And, there's nothing really _wrong_ with this
| construction, either. Like I said, it 's just something
| you have to accept, kind of like how every TV home or
| apartment is absolutely massive compared to what real
| people live in, or how people are able to comfortably fly
| on airplanes without squishing themselves into the seats
| or their heads being within inches or less of the roof of
| the cabin. Or the fact that if anybody coughs on TV,
| they're usually deathly ill.
|
| I'll have to check out _Black Mirror: Bandersnatch_ ,
| though. I've been putting off watching it for some reason
| -- maybe because for most of 2020, I felt like I was
| living in a _Black Mirror_ episode.
|
| Speaking of Netflix series that really get the time
| period correct, _Stranger Things_ is 100% exactly like
| what it was like to be a kid in the 80s. Starting from
| the bowl haircut on Will, right on down to every last
| detail of the mall from season 3, and battling the
| Demogorgon in a friend 's basement. Absolute 10/10 set
| design, and I never noticed a single anachronism.
| Sylamore wrote:
| Things happen around the technologies of the era, but the
| technologies are not the center of the show by any means.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| I thought Season 1 was the best season.
| adventured wrote:
| Season one was dramatically better than the last three
| seasons, all of which were filled with puffery and style over
| substance. Cameron - core to the show - got more distant,
| vague and poorly constructed with each season. The first
| season was gritty, tense, down to the metal. The rest of the
| seasons were good, not great, and weakened as each season
| went by. The last season was nearly mailed-in as far as story
| goes. It's like the writers were zooming out season by season
| and by the last season everything was distant, like watching
| cardboard cutouts of the characters from a great distance.
| farias0 wrote:
| I disagree. I loved Cameron's evolution, she really
| matured. And from season 2 onwards (maybe even after the
| first half of S01) they seemed to have a better grasp on
| who the characters were and what stories to tell. Cameron
| and Donna's relationship especially was simply beautifully
| told.
| afterburner wrote:
| I agree, I felt like the first season was the most
| evocative of a different time, the early 80s office tech
| environment.
|
| The second season felt like it had a more soap opera to it,
| so I stopped at the end of it. I got the sense from
| descriptions of the later seasons that this got worse.
| Found it odd the consensus where I looked was that the last
| two were the best and the 1st to be "tolerated".
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Every season had more soap opera to it than substance.
| But that's to be expected because it's a fictional drama
| and not a documentary.
|
| I don't agree that Cameron was "zoomed out" after the
| first season either. Her role in the 2nd season was
| bigger than the first. Frankly I like the way they
| written her in the later seasons because even from the
| first season she reminded of engineers who have more
| attitude than skill (and we've all worked with people
| like that!) so seeing her career largely wash out felt
| more authentic to how a character like her would have
| survived through those eras.
|
| On balance though, I felt this show was largely
| overrated. It had some good content but it was waaaay
| over the top with the melodrama. Unfortunately geek drama
| rarely satisfies American audiences so they need arson,
| punch ups and adultery to weaved into the story line.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Season 2 had the best startup portrayal. House full of
| hackers and game fanatics. Fantastic energy. I even
| bought a shirt with the Mutiny logo.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4
| afterburner wrote:
| I remember now I actually watched a bit of Season 3 and
| then quit, it wasn't Season 2 that made me quit per se. I
| did like Season 2 for its portrayal of BBSs, since I
| never did get in on that.
| TuringNYC wrote:
| I enjoyed Season 1 and 4, but the entire series was fantastic
| drama and historically accurate.
|
| The reason I enjoyed Season 4 so much was to see the arc of
| how individuals evolved over time, how they learned from
| their mistakes, got past failures, and enjoyed the ride.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| resubmit from days ago?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873949
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I've probably said this before, but I was a computer engineer in
| Texas in the 80s and this show captures that culture perfectly.*
| I first learned "Halt and Catch Fire" as an obscure illegal
| instruction on the 6800 processor that would lock it up. When I
| heard about this show my first reaction was "How dare they title
| a show with a meme from an obscure part of my hindbrain! Guess I
| can't use that for a password any more."
|
| *Well almost perfectly. I don't remember many engineers or coders
| being as attractive as the actors on this show.
| acomjean wrote:
| I love some of the old programmer stories. There is an in
| frequently updated Apple // podcast which can be kinda fun,
| which talks to some of the programmer from the time.
|
| https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/
| mindcrime wrote:
| _Well almost perfectly. I don 't remember many engineers or
| coders being as attractive as the actors on this show._
|
| I've only been working in this field since about 1997 or so, so
| I can't speak to what things were like in the 80's. But I can
| say that I've seen more than a few software engineer /
| programmer types who were very attractive, or could be if they
| chose to dress / style themselves so as to play up that aspect.
|
| Not sure if my perception is just "off" or if there was a point
| in time where this changed. Or maybe it's a geographic thing -
| I'm on the East Coast (NC specifically).
|
| Still, the old stereotype of the unwashed, nacho and crumbs
| covered shirt, neckbearded, basement dwelling programmer guy
| does linger...
| jorvi wrote:
| > *Well almost perfectly. I don't remember many engineers or
| coders being as attractive as the actors on this show.
|
| This always amuses me about American-produced shows. Even the
| guy cast as 'background hobo #2' is a handsome person with
| token dirt and ragged clothes applied.
| scandox wrote:
| This was always true for female actors, but up to about the
| late 1970s male actors - even leading ones - could have any
| kind of head on them ... Some wonderfully charismatic
| ugliness going on. I think the pendulum will swing back
| eventually. I hope.
| prepend wrote:
| I worked for a startup and we had a programming intern in my
| shop who was a new mom who wanted to learn programming. She
| was also an ex model from Denmark or Belgium or somewhere.
| She was really pretty, prettier than the actors on Halt and
| Catch Fire, and got a ton of attention from the rest of the
| programmers who were almost all typical programmers. [0]
|
| She was doing well as a programmer when the company folded.
|
| Other than this one programmer, I've never seen any
| programmers or product managers or engineers as attractive as
| in this show.
|
| [0] "In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a
| professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum
| writes of a malady he calls "the compulsion to program." He
| describes the afflicted as "bright young men of disheveled
| appearance, often with sunken, glowing eyes," who play out
| "megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence" at computer
| consoles; they sit at their machines, he writes, "their arms
| tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to
| strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention
| seems to be as riveted as a gambler's on the rolling dice."
| -- Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine -
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Some of my favorite comments on HN are when old school
| programmers like you share old school stories from the
| trenches. Love it.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| This is well done for sure, and I love HACF but already watched
| live and rewatched so not going to go back, but it's nice to
| connect alot of the materials and background that came up while
| we were all watching the show
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