Halt and Catch Fire (open spoilers)

Agreed.

I’m watching the show, and probably will keep watching it, but I keep scratching my head over what the point of any of the plot is. Are they going to bust out a great machine and thus morph their no-name company into Texas Instruments or something?

If this is based on reality, did this little podunk company do anything worth remembering? If it’s fictional, what great innovation are we building toward that might make sense?

I’m tending to agree with the now-cliche hacker chick: This budget box project is boring and nobody will care about it.

Thanks, everyone. You’ve saved me hours of TV viewing.
What would really happen is

  1. Whoops. We weren’t as compatible as we thought or
  2. Whoops - 57 other companies had the same idea.

On thinking about it a bit more, they could take it in interesting directions if someone on the show has the tech history/storytelling chops. Basically create a plausible alternative history where a Texas company creates cool things in the mid-80’s. This was around the time the Internet was taking off and they have hinted at that direction. There is no reason why the company has to remain a PC-clonemaker.

There are two main steps to reverse engineering the IBM PC. First, the hardware. The chips, how they are connected, timed, etc. Second, the ROM code that is the core instruction set for boot up, handling the hardware interface to the software, etc.

IBM used an “open” archictecture so that anyone could duplicate the hardware. There were nothing there that anyone else couldn’t buy and assemble. IBM didn’t have anything significant patented in hardware terms. They did this because it was cheap and fast. The group in Florida who put it together just didn’t care about the issue of protecting IBM’s hardware IP.

The ROM code is proprietary, copyrighted. It can’t just be copied. What the early cloners did was download the ROM code of the chip and print it out. This is supposedly what they did with the probes and copying down numbers. But in real life they had equipment then to automate this even back then.

Once you had the code you did two things:

  1. Figure out what each part did. E.g., “chunk A given input X does Y”. You write a complete spec of the top-level behavior of every bit of it.

You turn this info over to a second team who …

  1. Figures out how to duplicate the behavior. They write their own code. It is vital that they don’t see a single line of the original code.

Step 2 is what Cameron is doing. Step 1 seems to have been elided over.

Another goof that IBM made in protecting their PC was in just buying an OS from Microsoft (which actually went out and bought it off another guy), without requiring a decent exclusivity deal. So Microsoft made PC-DOS for IBM and MS-DOS for the clone makers with little difference between the two until much later.

IBM tried to reign in the clone makers introducing the proprietary Micro Channel bus for it’s PS/2s, requiring a license for anyone trying to clone that. That went over like a lead balloon and was widely ignored by others. It was a major blunder in that the clone makers became the “standard” PC makers and IBM was viewed as non-standard. Ouch.

The real issue with H&CF is that no company would let any employee, let alone a new hire, do all this cowboy crap on his own. He would have been tossed out and Cardiff Electric would hardly know he had been there.

I was hoping the Joe would have to woo Jean Smart to get the money. Instead he went after her “companion” to squelch the deal for revenge against John.

Is there something wrong with Annette O’Toole? She has looked really run down in recent TV guest appearances.

A nice story on the evolution of the PC industry; the linked page covers the period of the show.

BTW this is the kind of outrageous anecdote which makes me wish the show had been about an Atari-like company:

:smiley:

I’m wondering if Cameron’s interest in creating an interactive computer will wind up being Cardiff’s downfall. I mean, that’s how this story has to end, right? The little company that tried and was eventually clobbered by IBM and Apple?

Has anyone figured out why MacMillan was beaten by the two cops?

I think the show is based on Compaq. I could be wrong. But it sure seems that way.

Prior to its takeover the company was headquartered in a facility in northwest unincorporated Harris County, Texas, that now continues as HP’s largest United States facility.

I shouldn’t enjoy this show. I’m bored with AMC oh-so-gloomy shtick, I’m not interested in paleocomputing, and the* “charismatic yet sociopathic character manipulating ruthlessly everybody in an office where women are underappreciated” * makes it a less layered and shallower Mad Men clone.

And yet it works. I don’t understand why, but it works.

In a previous episode, the boss man told Joe he should have kicked Joe’s ass for what he did, and still might.

An episode or two later, that head honcho rancher guy told the boss to take control of Joe, during that conversation at the fence when head honcho guy asked the boss “Who’s running things over there?”

The boss man “bailed” Joe out of jail with little more than a smile and a wink to the desk clerk.
Seems pretty clear that the boss had his good ol’ boy buddies on the force put a hurt on Joe to send Joe the message that the boss man is in charge.

Good call, I think you’re right.

I even had one of those Compaq luggables back in the 80s.

But now I’m remembering that Joe had given a speech to his crew that included in the term “luggable” in a derisive tone. That’s when he set the bar at 15 pounds. He might have even said “Compaq has their luggable”…

Anyone still watching this show?

Last night’s episode, the last before the season finale next week, was fun. It was the episode in which they introduced the product at Comdex 83. First, there were complications because their credit cards, and therefore their reservations, were cancelled. So they had to scramble to acquire the booth and the hotel suite. The homemade nature of their efforts reminded me of my experiences with small, underfunded companies, so that was enjoyable.

But the big twist was

[SPOILER]that Donna’s boss from Texas Instruments, Hunt, and Brian (an engineer who had been fired by Cardiff) announced a new product that was clearly a rip-off of the Cardiff design. The Cardiff team responded by removing Cameron’s improvements, allowing their product to be faster and cheaper, and then announcing it as a more serious product. One guy even offered to buy 60,000 units for $900 each. So the product has potential.

And then at the end, Joe walked into a room in which the original Macintosh was demoed and he was clearly stunned. It was everything that Cameron talked about, in a working package.[/SPOILER]

We all remember Brian, right? He’s Gordon and Donna’s neighbor, who Gordon fired.

Brian met Donna’s boss at Gordon and Donna’s house, when they were both thinking of vandalizing it when nobody was home.

I found it so sad that these people worked so hard and just got cheated and beaten by unscrupulous competitors at every turn. It seems like the way the world really worked back in 1983 (and is prob not too diff today).

But I have had the experience of pouring my heart and soul into a project that lasted one or two years only to have it crumble to dust in the end. And that is absolutely heartbreaking. It’s enough to just rob you of the will to carry on. This episode just about brought me to tears. Believe it or not.

No, I think Brian met Cameron (the programmer) at Gordon and Donna’s house, when Cameron went there to vandalize it (but changed her mind).

And upon further reflection, it’s not at all clear when Donna’s boss was supposed to be working on this product. Their company seemed to be a new one, but up until the last episode we saw him working at TI. So was he moonlighting for this startup? Presumably their job was made easier by stealing Cardiff’s design.

But they weren’t beaten. Remember that someone offered to buy 60,000 units at $900 each. And then immediately offered to buy 70,000 units. Assuming that they can address the financial and production issues, they may be onto something. And even the fact that they removed Cameron’s improvements isn’t necessarily a problem. They can do further work on the design and offer an upgraded product next year.

Oh, right, that was Cameron. Hmmm.

So how did Donna’s boss meet Brian? I guess maybe when he was hanging around outside the house stalking Donna? Do you think we’re supposed to infer that the stalking was a cover story, and that he was really there because he was meeting with Brian? (Who lives in the house next door.)

My predictions (not based on any previews or anything) are Joe’s “It talks” statement is a reference to the TI Speak and Spell that Gordon fixed in the first episode. He works on it to send Cameron’s “What is your name” to a speech unit and it’s even better than Macintosh - “Hello I’m Macintosh” was just a gimmick, not the entire operating system.

Then IBM (or Apple) swoops in, offers a shitload of cash, and deep cans the entire project.

Is there a second season? Do they figure out how to use a mouse? Such suspense!

Oh my! Thank you ever so, Dewey. There was something wrong with my recording and I missed that. Oh dear.

Funny that I was really invested in this company from Dallas and I was so sad when they got bad news and happy when their fortunes appeared to be on an uptick. So, I was real happy to read your post.

OK, now that it’s over (Season 1 , anyway):

I think I watched every episode, and a summary of the primary characters and a question or two follows.

First, I like the way they wove real companies into the narrative. The MAC introduction at COMDEX was shown as a validation of everything Cameron had been pushing for at Cardiff, but really, Apple and Mac were never more than a niche product compared to the PC. It was innovative, sure, but also expensive and not a real alternative in the most desireable market, business. They tried to capture the education market, but never really succeeded, and today it is rare to run into a Mac shop in education. Nice storyline, but in reality the market wasn’t buying what Apple was selling.

Gordon finally sold his first computer, and had success. He had enough vision to know the right question to ask (“What’s next?”) but also had the awareness to know that his company had nobody who could answer that question after the defections. Cardiff was a small fish in a rapidly expanding pond, and companies like HP, Dell, and Gateway either didn’t exist yet or hadn’t entered the market.

Cameron was a visionary and was inventing AOL, along with smart mom. The assumption is she will get filthy rich for a long time until technology swamps her company without her being able to do much about it. The model just didn’t work anymore. It became Blockbuster or vice-versa.

That leaves Joe. I’m not sure if he is still employed by Cardiff, but it doesn’t look like it. It also leaves the big question of who the f*#% is in the Observatory. His mom? If there was a foreshadowing earlier in the series, I missed it. Also, what the hell was up with the blood smear in Joe’s car?

I don’t think that a second season has been green-lighted yet, but the critical response has been very good. I think it’ll get some Emmy nominations.