I recently watched all of Halt and Catch Fire, and i have to say it is a really special show. The first season is fun, but it really comes into its own in the following seasons, exploring long relationships, friendship, growth, and love in ways that really surprised me. Highly recommend.
Very nice! Love the CRT TV style. In terms of approach I’m a bit confused by the call for a ‘book club style watch party’ and the content which follows an education course format. With the first I expect a CTA button to join a session, maybe a scheduled Discord session or Sign-Up list for interest of same. So maybe the format of the program is an online meetup, with a short talk, and then discussion. The point here is community.
With the second I expect a CTA for a course, with the end result being some type of qualification, perhaps conformance to the startup mentality of the key characters, to help people form groups. The point there is to advance projects and also set yourself up as an authority.
At the moment it feels like a not-so-strong mix of the two.
Personally, I felt HCF was a much better reflection of the tech industry compared to Silicon Valley.
While I love both shows to death, I feel HCF really nailed a lot of the emotional and interpersonal aspects that come with entrepreneurship, venture capital, and engineering leadership.
It was also great watching HCF with my dad who started his career during the tail end of the show, and could call out a number of the technical aspects (eg. PBXes, the COBOL vs OOP wars, the search engine wars, etc).
yup. I was in tech in Dallas in the 80s and early 90s before chasing the money to sili Valley. I laughed for weeks at the short vignettes of Donna talking about and dealing with Texas Instrudlements management. They got it SPOT ON. Even the guy wearing the 3 piece suit interviewing Donna on her way out.
Oh wow, I had no idea they made a miniseries about ART+COM. I had heard of that company many times as a connection point of people associated with the Chaos Computer Club, but never looked into it.
> The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ ⓘ BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. Some versions of the test also require that those two women have names.[2]
> “Computers aren’t the thing; they’re the thing that gets us to the thing.”
I used to be overly pedantic about the kinds of things programmers often obsess over—like micro-benchmarks, the whole “I use Arch, by the way” attitude, and other obnoxious quirks. But this quote stuck with me and helped me move past that shallow, one-upmanship view of computers. Great show to ones who haven't watched yet.
It's a great line. I think our current tech industry has forgotten this. You can't make a product for everyone but you can make an environment for everyone. Something that can be adapted for (almost) anyone.
Take the phone industry. They're happily gouging developers, taking large sums of app sales. But at the same time, a smart phone isn't a smart phone without apps. Everyone has different ones installed and ones they highly depend on that aren't from Apple/Google. It's the program that makes the tool.
But this kind of thing is happening more and more and can only happen because consolidation. It maximizes profits for today but at the cost of higher future profits and better products. It's funny how there was a strong counter culture early on but it feels like that was lost.
Loved the show but the biggest problem was that the same core group of characters kept being the top innovators in wave after wave of advancements. I do wonder if the writers and producers planned on handling that differently but backed out when the main characters turned out to be more popular than expected.
In season one, Joe and Gordon are the main characters, with Cameron a small step behind them. Donna and Bos were firmly secondary. In season two, Cam and Donna became the focus, Bos became more prominent, and we got a bunch of new characters. Joe and Gordon were still important but clearly had less focus on them. I have to wonder if the plan was for each season to introduce new characters who would be set up to be the season after that's main focus. The Mutiny crew could have been pioneers of gaming in the third season, with some Donna and Cam still there, and special appearances by Gordon and Joe. The new characters from that season could be the main of the internet/virus season. For consistency, Bos could have been the common thread in all of the companies as the business manager going along for the ride as the main characters innovated.
Maybe that wasn't the plan and I'm just spit balling but it would have been a nice way of handling the advancing technology without making the same characters the titans of industry constantly. Not sure how well the fans would have reacted to their favorite characters, even Cameron, being relegated and eventually ghosted.
If you get a chance, go back and check out the C64 power LEDs. They're all off. I suppose they intended to CGI the red glow in later but went overbudget?
In fairness, I didn't notice this until my 2nd time watching the series.
I wonder if they got confused with the Amiga, which had an audio bypass filter which was off, when the led was off. I don't know anyone that didn't do so, an everyone's power LEDs were off, as a result, on Amigas.
Everyone in here is critiquing the intricacies of plot and forced drama, and here I was just annoyed by the regular expression on a chalkboard behind Cameron when she was working on implementing a BIOS, and the fact that a Jeep Comanche pickup outside of a motel -- a vehicle that was either brand new or not even yet released -- had badly oxidized paint.
Easily one of my favourite "tech" TV shows. But now I'm curious, has anyone recently found something similar to HCF that they similarly enjoyed? I've never found anything I've enjoyed quite as much as HCF.
I’ve rewatched it last year and, like a really good book, I found myself liking a different set of characters than on my first watch. There’s truly a lot of depth there. And a lot of humanity, which is something we sometimes forget about the tech industry.
I may have to develop additional content. The thing I noticed about the show is they got many obscure details of life in Dallas in the 80s correct. The neighborhood they filmed Gordon and Donna's house in? It looked very much like Richardson. [though I'm pretty sure it was actually Atlanta.] Joe's condo? It looked very much like some condos they put in on the north side of Woodall Rogers. The night club? Just like the Starck Club. Even the house Donna and Cameron set up Mutiny looked very much like a friend's house on Vickery. [again, most certainly shot in Atlanta]
I read the production designers used old issues of Texas Homes, D Magazine and sears catalogs as visual guides, and it really shows through. I had a very strong nostalgic reaction. The only thing missing was an avocado green refrigerator.
I think it would be fun to take some of the shots and then try to find photos of places, people and things that might have influenced the designers.
Thinking about HCF, they did a better than average job of showing Women in Tech. I worked at IBM and DEC in the 80s and maybe as many as one third of Programmer / Analyst positions were held by women. IIRC, 1985 was the peak at IBM and it started falling after that. But my memory was female software engineers did not seem as much an endangered species as they do now.
All of the characters had flaws, but I appreciated the representation. Though I suspect the flaws were added for dramatic effect. Perfect people doing perfect things doesn't make for drama.
Favorite show of all time....a few members of the cast were at the 10th anniversary panel as part the ATX Television Festival last year ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 55.9 ms ] threadEdit: removed spoilers
The length of the plan seems like a DnD campaign in terms of length though, it's roughly 3 months of consistent activities, but it may be worth it.
With the second I expect a CTA for a course, with the end result being some type of qualification, perhaps conformance to the startup mentality of the key characters, to help people form groups. The point there is to advance projects and also set yourself up as an authority.
At the moment it feels like a not-so-strong mix of the two.
Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25912241 - Jan 2021 (173 comments)
While I love both shows to death, I feel HCF really nailed a lot of the emotional and interpersonal aspects that come with entrepreneurship, venture capital, and engineering leadership.
It was also great watching HCF with my dad who started his career during the tail end of the show, and could call out a number of the technical aspects (eg. PBXes, the COBOL vs OOP wars, the search engine wars, etc).
> The Bechdel test (/ˈbɛkdəl/ ⓘ BEK-dəl),[1] also known as the Bechdel-Wallace test, is a measure of the representation of women in film and other fiction. The test asks whether a work features at least two women who have a conversation about something other than a man. Some versions of the test also require that those two women have names.[2]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechdel_test
I used to be overly pedantic about the kinds of things programmers often obsess over—like micro-benchmarks, the whole “I use Arch, by the way” attitude, and other obnoxious quirks. But this quote stuck with me and helped me move past that shallow, one-upmanship view of computers. Great show to ones who haven't watched yet.
Take the phone industry. They're happily gouging developers, taking large sums of app sales. But at the same time, a smart phone isn't a smart phone without apps. Everyone has different ones installed and ones they highly depend on that aren't from Apple/Google. It's the program that makes the tool.
But this kind of thing is happening more and more and can only happen because consolidation. It maximizes profits for today but at the cost of higher future profits and better products. It's funny how there was a strong counter culture early on but it feels like that was lost.
In season one, Joe and Gordon are the main characters, with Cameron a small step behind them. Donna and Bos were firmly secondary. In season two, Cam and Donna became the focus, Bos became more prominent, and we got a bunch of new characters. Joe and Gordon were still important but clearly had less focus on them. I have to wonder if the plan was for each season to introduce new characters who would be set up to be the season after that's main focus. The Mutiny crew could have been pioneers of gaming in the third season, with some Donna and Cam still there, and special appearances by Gordon and Joe. The new characters from that season could be the main of the internet/virus season. For consistency, Bos could have been the common thread in all of the companies as the business manager going along for the ride as the main characters innovated.
Maybe that wasn't the plan and I'm just spit balling but it would have been a nice way of handling the advancing technology without making the same characters the titans of industry constantly. Not sure how well the fans would have reacted to their favorite characters, even Cameron, being relegated and eventually ghosted.
In fairness, I didn't notice this until my 2nd time watching the series.
I’ve rewatched it last year and, like a really good book, I found myself liking a different set of characters than on my first watch. There’s truly a lot of depth there. And a lot of humanity, which is something we sometimes forget about the tech industry.
Looks like it's 404 since February. [2] Any idea what happened?
[1] https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/c...
[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/https://worldwide...
I read the production designers used old issues of Texas Homes, D Magazine and sears catalogs as visual guides, and it really shows through. I had a very strong nostalgic reaction. The only thing missing was an avocado green refrigerator.
I think it would be fun to take some of the shots and then try to find photos of places, people and things that might have influenced the designers.
All of the characters had flaws, but I appreciated the representation. Though I suspect the flaws were added for dramatic effect. Perfect people doing perfect things doesn't make for drama.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSUs3adMQ8 https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=halt+and+catch+...