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Welcome To 1986: Inside 'Halt And Catch Fire's' High-Tech Time Machine (fastcompany.com)
The third season of AMC's technology drama "Halt and Catch Fire" painstakingly recreated Silicon Valley and San Francisco in 1986. Long-time Slashdot reader harrymcc shares his first-person report:
The new episodes...are rich with carefully-researched plot points, dialogue, and sets full of vintage technology (including a startup equipped with real Commodore 64s and a recreated IBM mainframe). I visited the soundstage in Atlanta where the producers have recreated Northern California in the 1980s, and spoke with the show's creators and stars about the loving attention they devote to getting things right.
Harry argues that the show "is in part about how we got from the past to the present," and writes that he saw several 5 1/4-inch floppy disks "including Memorex, 3M, and BASF FlexyDisk," plus "a manual for Frogger for the Atari 2600, a copy of a spreadsheet program known as MicroPro CalcStar...and countless other little pieces of history."
Harry argues that the show "is in part about how we got from the past to the present," and writes that he saw several 5 1/4-inch floppy disks "including Memorex, 3M, and BASF FlexyDisk," plus "a manual for Frogger for the Atari 2600, a copy of a spreadsheet program known as MicroPro CalcStar...and countless other little pieces of history."
Meh, it's a soap opera that happens to include 1980s computer culture.. zzzz..
You clearly have no idea how the SID works.
As opposed to the soap opera of "un-reality crap" ??
At least you can learn interesting history.
"But wait" you go, "I watch Sci-Fi, such as Dark Matter, Farscape, Fringe, Killjoys, etc."
Well that's a soap opera in set in space.
The question isn't "Is this a soap opera?"
The question is: "Is this interesting?"
Season 1 was basically about creating an "IBM" Clone, so the storyline pulls details from Compaq, but then throws a few details that is more in line with the creation of the Apple Lisa than anything else. It ends with a truck load of computers being torched.
Season 2 is likely a lot more familiar to the /. crowd, as it has all the things you remember about the early BBS era (that I was fortunate to see, but the area I lived in lacked any BBS, so long distance calls boo, so I created my own.) The *spoiler* they eventually created the first cable modem... just to cheat a demonstration. It ends with a virus destroying everything in front investors.
So everything in the show feels authentic enough that I'm not wanting to scream profanties at the screen when something is wrong, because the details that they get wrong are anachronisms that are off by just enough to get noticed, but not enough to go "that is too stupid", like season 2 is supposed to take place in what is approximately 1984, So you can hear the Nintendo in the background of one scene. Not enough of a big deal is being made over it (pretty much everyone who saw one between 1983 and 1989 decided that the home PC was not a games machine.)