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.)
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.
> *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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[+] [-] libraryofbabel|5 years ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|5 years ago|reply
*Well almost perfectly. I don't remember many engineers or coders being as attractive as the actors on this show.
[+] [-] jorvi|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mindcrime|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] herodoturtle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|5 years ago|reply
https://appletimewarp.libsyn.com/
[+] [-] vincent-manis|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rootbear|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindcrime|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newswasboring|5 years ago|reply
I really want to see this, can't find it by googling though. Maybe you know where to find it?
[+] [-] stevecalifornia|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hnlmorg|5 years ago|reply
- 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/
[+] [-] hardwaresofton|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] pmiller2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickjj|5 years ago|reply
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD_kCKiSkoI
[+] [-] larrydag|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkd|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] barbecue_sauce|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] itsoktocry|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bishnu|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] vimy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raybb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imagica|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] TuringNYC|5 years ago|reply
And w/r/t accuracy, I dont mean technical accuracy but rather the characters types, the ups-and-downs of startups, the failures, etc.
[+] [-] Bayart|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Barrin92|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prepend|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
[1] https://ashleyblewer.com/
[+] [-] ablwr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vages|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jhbadger|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ido|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bishnu|5 years ago|reply
Actually, the first season of H&CF cribs a lot from the book (from the overall plot to a few very specific anecdotes).
[+] [-] minhaz23|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newswasboring|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Apocryphon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] racl101|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adamredwoods|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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|5 years ago|reply
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.