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.

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.