But not in the UK :(
Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
31–38 of 38 posts
Re: Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
#32Re: Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
#33This show re-kindled my love for 80's music - if you haven't check it out already, and love the soundtrack, there's an AMC playlist for the show on Spotify .. worth using!
Re: Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
#34FWIW a lot of this history is covered in PBS's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary without the dramatic license. Kudos to the producers for attempting to make BIOS reverse engineering look exciting, though.
Though it's my understanding that they could have just booted into DOS and performed list on the BIOS? (To get the compiled binary)
Yeah, extracting would be the easy part (the engineer did say as such in the episode). I doubt they would have transcribed it by hand in 1983. Writing the spec was the hard part, it actually took nine months and a team of 15 to produce the final BIOS. (assuming we're talking about Compaq here, but the show keeps it intentionally vague)
Re: Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
#35In all honesty I didn't really enjoy the series. I keep watching because it felt so alien. All the characters seamed very 1 dimensional, and the writing I felt like it was reaching and not really selling. If you can, watch it, make up your own mind.
I also found it relatively shallow, but I mostly enjoyed watching it because it introduced the whole 80's computer revolution story to my wife, who had previously ignored the subject. She seemed to get along fine with the characters without getting too geeked out by the technology, so I imagine that there is a balancing act going on with the AMC writers behind the show.
That said, we're both looking forward to the next season .. for me, mostly because I love the soundtrack and have a secret crush on Cameron .. for my wife, I guess for the same reasons. ;)
Re: Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
#36The first season start of well with lots of cool dramatised hacking and startup culture scenes. But near the middle of the first season it had turned into a unbelievable soap opera with a bit of tech as a backdrop.
Silicon Valley , on the other hand, is great.
See, this is interesting, because I found Silicon Valley puerile and delinquent -- too many dick jokes -- whereas Halt and Catch Fire is a little more intelligent. Generational difference? Possibly: I grew up with computers in the 70's.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
#37FWIW a lot of this history is covered in PBS's "Triumph of the Nerds" documentary without the dramatic license. Kudos to the producers for attempting to make BIOS reverse engineering look exciting, though.
Though it's my understanding that they could have just booted into DOS and performed list on the BIOS? (To get the compiled binary)
"performed list" on the BIOS? How did that work, exactly?
In the very early days of the IBM PC, it wasn't so easy, alas. I guess they could have used DEBUG.COM to get a dump, but this isn't quite "performing a list":
Re: Halt and Catch Fire (Season 1) available on Netflix
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean honestly I just bought a VPN connection. Costs me $45 a year and (probably?) doesn't steal anything. I realized how much time I spent trying to find mirrors and torrents for things that were widely available to stream in the US, and decided it was more practical to spend the money.
I don't really think it's "legal". In fact, I don't see how this is any more or less legal than circumventing region blocks on DVDs etc. That happens to be legal in Norway, but as I understand it would be a breach of DMCA in the US. Not sure about Australia, but I think (?) you have just as draconian content/copy-protection laws? That said, see my other comment for using ssh as a socks5-proxy. YMMW which is easier (V…
I'm not suggesting it's legal. The moment I can get the same content in Canada as I can in the US without buying 100+ useless channels on TV then I'll start paying for content. I have friends in the movie industry who are affected by behaviour like mine, but they can talk to the MPAA if they have a problem with it.