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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..
Anyone seen my 1541 floopies?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
"if only to get the SID ICs in them. No emulator has been able to faithfully reproduce the audio coming out of those."
Yeah, those 3 oscillators could wind right through your head.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I can open a cupboard and pull out a real C64 with 5 1/4-inch floppy disks, although I favored Verbatim.
I've got a C64 under the TV with a SD card attached. DropZone still owns.
I love this show! Lee Pace (who plays Joe) was the actor who played Thanos in "Guardians of the Galaxy"...
No, he played Ronan. Josh Brolin was Thanos.
No, Lee didn't play thanos, he played the 'Cree fanatic' who worked with Thanos's children.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
i was lucky enough to be getting my CCNA back in 01 at the same time the school was going to throw out its c64 equipment. i brought home pretty much an entire mini lab, a dozen c64s, a c128D 2 monitors, a dozen diskdrives a 300 baud modem and 2 tall dressers full of manuals another full of software. not to menton joysticks and game pads.
i still have it all 15 years later,
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
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?"
I started watching Halt and Catch Fire, but it never really held my interest. I don't think that I made it past the 5th episode. The portends to be based on 1980's experiences, but I can't think of anyone with whom they could base the main characters off of.
Yup. The main elements of soap opera are that it is a serial with a large primary cast of characters, where the primary (or even exclusive) focus is on inter-personal relationships and the emotional lives of those characters.
If it's that kind of show, it's a soap opera.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
When I was programming commercial games on the C64 I eventually used a cross-development system, which was a piece of hardware attached to some cruddy PC clone, an Apricot iirc... Basically it used an interface card to the target computer (I also occasionally did Spectrum and Amstrad CPC/Schneider stuff, but mostly C64). It was horribly expensive, about £2000, and that was before purchasing a HDD... Would be interested to see if this show features that development system, but I'm highly unlikely to watch it, I still haven't watched Silicon Valley or Mr. Robot yet...
I have four SX-64s that the lab at work was throwing out.
I actually used one of them for a test in the lab in about 2007.
The question actually might be 'is this a soap opera" purely on the grounds that you seem to have confused Sci-Fi's dramas with soap operas. Here is the clue - dramas typically revolve around a self contained episode. So, Big Bang Theory - Drama. Sure, there are some elements that might carry between episodes, like a character might get married etc, but the format of the show is that of a dramatization, not a soap opera. Here is a link to '30 of the best' soap operas - http://www.imdb.com/list/ls000... - as an indication, and what you are likely to find is that most successful soap operas are over 30 years in production at this stage, and are very well known brands, like Love and the Restless, Days of our Lives etc.
That said, you are all wrong, because Halt and Catch Fire is also a dramatization. The story ends every season, in case you hadn't noticed. If you are still confused, here is a wikipedia article with a further break down - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The first three seconds of the (longer) trailer of the first season lost me with:
LOADHIGH A:/SYS/BIOS
PRINT /D:LPT1 /A:/SYS/BIOS
What the hell is this? TI-RTOS? Nope. CP/M, or its bastardized cousin, PC/DOS? Nope. Sorry - with a name like "Halt and Catch Fire", I'd have expected something better than stupid TV writer gibberish.
I mean realism is not everything with those shows, but it hurts when they include segments that make no sense in he context and are historically inaccurate.
I'm specifically talking about the "reverse engineering the IBM PC" bit. That bit involved reading a PROM with switches and LEDs... those LEDs came in colours unimaginable back in the 1980s. That wouldn't be bad if the whole scene would have made no sense. You can read out that PROM with the BASIC Interpreter provided with the computer... and the rest was documented in the manuals. The IBM PC was, essentially, open source (but not free). That's why it áfas to popular. There was no need to reverse engineer.
So spending a large part of your episode showing something that made no sense... and showing that very badly, kinda killed it for me.
I don't know how the other episodes went, but this kinda pissed me off. In a time where we have TV series like Silicon Valley or Mr Robot we shouldn't applaud a props guy ordering some C-64s.
Typing this on a '88 model M. No converters needed if your computer has a regular ps/2 port.
oops reading difficult. Yeah, need model F or compatible for a pc/xt.
At least you can learn interesting history.
No you can't you can be presented with a strange grab bag of facts ascribed to the wrong subjects, at the wrong moments in the wrong context. Its fine enough for folks that mostly know the real story. Its a source of confusion for everyone else.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Which is why a lot of people do not like soap operas. Science Fiction offers an escape from our humdrum life to a more exciting one. While a soap opera we just relieve the awkwardness of our teenage/young adult life.
However a good show needs to be strong characters and plot. Many shows while may had been initially popular due to strong character or plot, just don't have the same re-viewing popularity after it has been seen, because if it had a good plot but dull characters you don't care because you know what happens, or strong characters and weak plot you just don't care because there isn't anything driving what is going on.
Soap Opera get a bad rap because of their history of being cheaply produced and written just so they can get many episodes out over a long period of time.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The first three seconds of the (longer) trailer of the first season lost me with:
LOADHIGH A:/SYS/BIOS
PRINT /D:LPT1 /A:/SYS/BIOS
What the hell is this? TI-RTOS? Nope. CP/M, or its bastardized cousin, PC/DOS? Nope. Sorry - with a name like "Halt and Catch Fire", I'd have expected something better than stupid TV writer gibberish.
hell Yah. Star Trek lost me at the whole faster than light space travel thing, Firefly with English and Chinese speaking human beings in a distant solar system... That whole "Willing suspension of disbelief" thing is overrated...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I'm surprised that NONE of the designers on the show were aware that the most recognizable and maligned font of all time, Comic Sans (shown in this image http://b.fastcompany.net/multi... ), wasn't invented until 1994.
Perfection is hard.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Halt and Catch Fire? Am I missing something 'attractive' about the title?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sorry, didn't mean to disparage your pet rock. /snark
Oh, I have a good general idea, having worked with early Moogs, Oberheims, Sequential Circuits, Yamahas, etc. Apparently my comments may have gone the wrong way with some. I loved the SID, enjoyed making music with it. And the graphics programs that ran on sound were great for the time. Eventually I bypassed the SID with a custom MIDI rig to an SC 6-TRAK, and did some great stuff with my C64 "music workstation".
Anyways, sorry to ruffle any fans feathers. And, fwiw, maybe I did forget details of an obsolete chip of old comp from 30 some years ago. Did it not have 3 oscillators? They had unique sounds when they beat off of each other.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Thanos is actually played by JOSH BROLIN and will appear again in the Infinity War two-parter starting in 2017.
Computing and Programming Since 1975 The Best Kept Secret in Technical Support Master of the Bare Metal Clean Install
nice, sometimes i break out some old games, q bert and whatnot are alot of fun on the orange screen
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same