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."

Comments

Re:Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in

[Guy Harris]

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.

Re:So?

[Darinbob]

No screenshots I've seen from that show look like Silicon Valley in the 80s. At best they look like a San Francisco hipsters idea of what it was like. Seriously, brick buildings in Silicon Valley?

Re:Guardians of the Galaxy tie-in

[UnknownSoldier]

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?"

Who are the main characters based on

[jader3rd]

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.

Re:Who are the main characters based on

[tlhIngan]

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.

They didn't. It's based on real events that did happen, but like Silicon Valley, it features a set of characters who are basically living through the home computing boom of the 80s. There are some real life similarities, but I think they were done to tell more interesting side stories that happened for real that people may not know about,

Season 1 was about developing an IBM PC clone and basically delves into the design and coding of the most important part, the BIOS. They also explore side threads like a friendly computer that greets you and all that, bookending with the discovery of the Macintosh demo and its graphics.

Season 2 was developing an online service, timesharing systems, and worms (a recount of the Morris worm).

Season 3 is just developing, and it's too early to tell what stores it may tell.

It's less about real life 1980s, and more about a bunch of people doing tech stuff during the 1980s, completely independently of what happened. Sometimes they tell an interesting story like Senaris (Morris worm), which given how limited internet connectivity was in the 1980s, most people blew right past, but here it is retold (a programming bug caused it to spread over and over again).

Take it more for the nostalgia of what the 80s were like in the tech industry and less about real history. And enjoy it - Season 1 didn't get great ratings, but AMC felt it had potential and gave it a season 2. Season 2 had terrible ratings and for some reason or other, AMC renewed it. Chances are, though, Season 3 is it. (Let's say Walking Dead is penthouse. Halt and Catch Fire is somewhere in sub-basement level 10, only accessible via ladder from a dark corner of the underground parking lot because that's where someone decided to put a storage rack.

Re:Who are the main characters based on

[Anonymous Coward]

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.)

Programming on the C64 hardware

[andrewa]

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'm sorry... Can that really be called research?

[chaoskitty]

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 couldn't get past the first episode

[Casandro]

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.

Re:So?

[a_n_d_e_r_s]

First 2 seasons they where based in texas. Its mirroring the fact that Compaq was an off-shoot from Texas intruments. Compaq was the first company that reverse engineered the BIOS.

Re:So?

[Rob Y.]

It's my impression that Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS with some nod-and-wink help from Microsoft in order to wrest the PC business away from IBM.

This show simply implies they were building a better clone, and has nothing to do with reverse engineering the BIOS. In fact, there's a subplot about 'building a new OS that understands natural language commands'. ...and then the Mac happens. So, it's a bit of a mishmash of everything that was going on at the time. Now they're trying to compete with Compuserv. Go figure. Fun fact: a colleague of mine founded ECHO (a glorified BBS / 'online community') at about that time. She was non-technical, so I don't know how off the shelf the software for such things was at the time...