Bert kills Lou – Series finale spoilers!
… with Ginsberg’s nipple in the computer room!
Apologies if this has already been answered (I’ve read this thread over two days, and may have forgotten), but what was the deal with the Kennedy assassination newspaper when Meghan was packing? For the life of me, I couldn’t figure it out.
Personally, I’m hoping for a happy ending for (at least) Don at this point. We’ve seen him bottom out a few times now, and his struggling with his demons has made for some interesting episodes, but I find him more compelling when he’s trying to grow as a person. And for someone as smart as Don in his 40s, it really is more realistic that he would start working on becoming a better person rather than continuing to spiral down.
From Sepinwall:
“* When Megan is rifling through the closet looking for the fondue pot and other treasures to bring back California, she finds the newspaper Don saved from the day after President Kennedy was assassinated — which (as several of you have noted) was the event that precipitated the end of Don’s marriage to Betty.”
Lots of people saved newspapers from that day. I did and only threw it away last year when I moved.
Does it? Bert’s shares don’t suddenly evaporate if he dies. Somebody either get’s them or the other partners have to pay of his next-of-kin (haven’t seen his lesbian sister Alice in awhile).
Probably not. This is best left to lawyers, but SCP appears to be a partnership. There are several kinds of partnerships in law but the common one is a general partnership. Pretty much everything is spelled out in the partnership agreement. A next of kin can only inherit if the agreement specifically allows it. More often the remaining partners can buy out the shares. They may have insurance policies placed on one another so that they have the money to do so.
What’s interesting about partnerships that could make this a cool plot point is that the partnership automatically dissolves upon a partner’s death (unless specified otherwise). Since we have no clue how the partnership agreement is written, Weiner could take it in any direction.
But I bet that Harry gets screwed no matter what.
But Ted does indeed take an account in an entirely different direction when he and Don present to Chevy together. They (ostensibly) scrap what they’ve each got and come up with something new the night before.
We also have no idea what Chevy was asking for from CGC or Cutler’s thoughts on the merger when it was posed to him.
Although it wasn’t specifically address what did happen to his shares, there’s no reason to think that Mrs. Pryce is a partner in the company. I don’t think inheritance is the immediate option for whatever agreement SCP (previously SCDP) is running under.
Cutler used the phrase “proprietary software”; I wonder if that was widely understood in 1969 among people without a computer background.
Good point. “Proprietary”- yes. “Software”- no. Most people in that era didn’t even know that computers required programs to do anything. They thought they were wired up to do the jobs from the factory. The idea that some electronic thing could be modified easily to to do different tasks was alien.
Except for someone who might have been spending time with a computer expert while installing an IBM computer costing tens of thousands of dollars.
I wasn’t thinking of Cutler himself but the other partners who didn’t seem to need any clarification.
This is television, where only the dramatic moments are shown. Since this is going to be a huge selling point for SCP you can be sure that they sat down at some time to learn all the buzzwords they need to pitch this to prospective clients. That’s what ad people do in the real world. They spend time, often months, living with the clients and soaking up every aspect of the business so that they can find campaigns that solve their pressing problems. Learning the vocabulary of a business is basic. If the ad people don’t speak the same language as the business people they’ll fail.
Advertising is not about sitting in a room thinking up a snappy slogan, no matter how many times that’s all that television shows.
Maybe they should have added a scene in this episode showing Peggy and a flunky doing marketing research in a parking lot of a Burger Chef. You know, for realism.
This is 1969, when I was taking programming in high school. With all of IBM’s advertising, they certainly did know what software was back then. Computers were hardly new.
I have a problem with proprietary software. Most software not from IBM came from an internal programming staff and so was proprietary. IBM provided software with the computers - it got unbundled about the time of the show, but of course that software had nothing to do with what SCP needed. Off the shelf software was pretty rare. So using proprietary software then was kind of like them saying they had an analog clock - the alternative didn’t exist yet.
I doubt that IBM ads aimed at business readers in the 60’s would have used terms like software which they couldn’t assume would be understood.
For example I found this 1966 ad. Businessmen in 1969 may have been aware of the general concept of software but I doubt they were familiar with the word itself.
Your point about proprietary software is a good one. In fact it was an anti-trust suit against IBM in 1969 itself which stimulated the growth of an independent software industry.
Incidentally I was reading the chapter on the System 360 in Watson Jr’s autobiography and it’s a fascinating story worthy of a movie in itself. It was one of the biggest gambles in all of business history and for a while it looked like it would sink the company. NBC has a nice piecewith some background about the 360.
It still boggles my mind that the 360 which cost around 15 million in today’s dollars was probably less powerful than the average smartphone.
There’s no probably about it. The IBM 360/50 operated at roughly 150K operations/second. The latest Apple A7 system on a chip is capable of about 150 billion operations/second, between the CPU and GPU. Meaning the $800 iPhone 5s in your pocket is about a million times faster than the $15M machine you see in Mad Men.
In fact, the slowest microchip I could find, the ATiny4, used in remote controls and battery voltage regulators among other things, purchasable for 40 cents each wholesale, is still 8 times faster than the IBM 360/50.