Okay, I’ve searched the entire Internet and haven’t found one mention. I use Dish for my antenna. I watched the first episode of the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire. Disappointed by the opening credits explanation of the title, and the premise that the BIOS code was the secret to the PC revolution.
I set the DVR to record “New Episodes” and was surprised to see the next one was Episode 5. I waited it out, recording episodes 5,4,3,2 in that order. Having the full set, I started watching, continuing with episode 2, only to realize it was not the continuation of episode 1. On a hunch, I jumped to 5 and found it picked up were 1 left off.
Apparently AMC, or at least Dish, has numbered the episodes backwards. How does that go unnoticed by the companies involved for several weeks and why am I the only person on the planet (with Internet access) that seems to have noticed?
Any other opinions about this show. So far it seems to be more of a soap opera and pretty short on technical accuracy.
It may be the producers’ idea of an inside joke. Lots of assembler instructions operate right-to-left, as does reverse polish notation, various forms of symbolic logic, etc.
The BIOS shenanigans let a horde of other computer companies produce IBM clones, which the “PCs” in use today are descendents of. The key here is that an IBM clone could run the same software as the original IBMs - so you didn’t have to start from scratch.
Notice anything? Commodore had a machine that was technically superior in many ways to the IBM machine, but without a horde of competing companies producing new and improved versions of it, it dies away. Ditto with Apple. In both cases, Apple and Commodore had superior products, initially, and they gained a huge amount of market share.
So, yeah, the BIOS code was pretty important. Had the judges ruled that clean room reverse engineering was illegal, things would have gone very differently. Maybe an open source architecture from someone else would have dominated, or perhaps the company that was most generous with licensing terms would have succeeded.
I would be delighted if that was the reason. My personal calculator is an HP-25 from my Computer Science days that works in reverse polish notation. My wife and kids always thought it was strange that I had a hard time using a “standard” calculator. But as wrong as they get other technical details in this show I doubt if they would be savvy enough to understand, much less include such a subtle joke.
So, yeah, the BIOS code was pretty important./QUOTE]
I disagree. The BIOS was a crude form of an operating system. The code was the simple part. The marketeering battle was in what it looked like to the user and how to convince them one was better than another. As a Computer Science student in the 70’s a standard project was to create a simple operating system from a set of specifications.
This show makes it sound like IBM had the only people on the planet capable of writing code. “Reverse Engineering” might have been an interesting project for a serious computer nerd, but hardly the most practical way to create a new product.
The real advancement that made “home” computers practical was the hardware in the form of an EPROM or ROM (Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory) that held it’s programming even when powered off. That allowed the machine to go through it’s startup process with no interaction from the user, letting them hit the power switch and eventually having an operating system functional machine. There was nothing magic in the code it contained.
Half of the story of the home computer is the advancements in hardware (like non-volatile memory). The other half is the operating systems battles. That is what makes a particular brand of computer what it is to the user. The operating system was how Bill Gates out-foxed IBM and why Apple is where it is today. Nobody wanted to copy the other guy, they wanted to build their own that was better.
Question: Have you been watching the show or just commenting second hand?
Anyway, the goal isn’t to write any old BIOS, it’s to write a BIOS that duplicates the IBM BIOS as closely as possible. In the show, the standard is Lotus 1-2-3. But MS Flight Simulator later turned out to be the key test. That takes real skill and a team of top experts. H&CF only has the one rookie whiz. That’s not realistic. Cameron could write a BIOS probably. But one that really duped the IBM BIOS in the time given? Nope.
It’s not just simple functionality that mattered (“On interrupt X with value Y do Z.”), but timing was critical. Too many programs assumed that certain things took a certain amount of time. Mess with the timing and stuff just breaks. Cameron’s wondercode is going to break a lot of timing.
A lot of companies made clones. None of them matched the IBM BIOS perfectly. Each had differences. The ones that were very close and sold well (e.g., Compaq), MS accommodated by tweaking things in MS-DOS to smooth most of the glitches out. (MS had a vested interested in seeing the clone biz take off.)
I don’t understand what the OP meant when they said they searched “the entire Internet” but didn’t find one mention. Most every TV show is listed in IMDB. Here is the link for H&CF:
I like this show too. But I fear it will not last very long. The cast is good. The story is good. But the story is essentially about the development of IBM PC Clones and so I can’t imagine how people who are not very interested in that story can follow this show.
Therefore, I expect this show will not be able to sustain itself for more than a season or so. However, I am usually wrong when predicting how long a show will run. Notoriously wrong. So, it could well run for many seasons. I just don’t understand how that would be possible. I could very well be missing something here. In fact, I hope that I am.
It’s a real good show and deserves to run for at least several seasons. If you have any interest in the IBM PC - especially its early development - I would recommend this show to you with much enthusiasm.
My understanding was that although there were a great many companies that made IBM PC clones, only a very few created their own BIOS. All the others had to pay a licensing fee to one of the companies that created a BIOS.
Writing a BIOS was a very serious undertaking and I could be wrong, but I don’t think it’s a job that could be done by one person in just a few weeks. I would guess it would require a great many coders and several months at the very least.
If anyone knows for sure, I would certainly appreciate hearing the truth about that.
Thank goodness the judges were savvy enough to realize the importance of allowing companies to reverse engineer software (like the IBM PC BIOS). It only makes sense that it should be illegal and if it were not legal, then IBM would have a monopoly on the PC and would be able to charge outrageous fees to their competitors to use their BIOS.
What’s more, the price of a close to the end user would then skyrocket past the price of a Macintosh and the entire industry would not be anywhere near as successful as it actually became.
All I can say is thank goodness those judges were as savvy as they were. It was a real boost for the US economy.
