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Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

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Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#361

Post by mikepurvis »

jjk166 wrote: post #336
mikepurvis wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised Lee Pace doesn't get more recognition; I've loved a lot of his quirkier projects like Wonderfalls, Pushing Daisies, and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but it's not like he hasn't also been in mainstream things like The Hobbit and Guardians of the Galaxy.

He's in very heavy makeup in Guardians of the Galaxy (and his blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in Captain Marvel), and while you can get a good look at his face in The Hobbit, his character doesn't get much screentime and isn't especially prominent - and indeed I don't think the Hobbit trilogy really turned any actors into household names which weren't already. I love Lee Pace but there really hasn't been a blockbuster…

That's fair. I think his starring moment was really Pushing Daisies, but that kind of thing is not for everyone; even just the hyperreal aesthetic would be a barrier for some.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#362

Post by jrmg »

danielvaughn wrote: post #3

Lee Pace's performance in that show is one of my all time favorites. It's incredibly hard to play a charismatic marketing guru because in some sense, you're not acting. In a given scene, the character might be trying to convince people around him of some crazy idea, but if he hasn't convinced you, the viewer, then the entire illusion falls apart. So he really has to do in real life what he's pretending to do on scree…

It was easy to dismiss the show at the time because, though Pace’s performance was great from the beginning, it felt like he was a Temu Don Draper in an 80s Mad Men wannabe with ‘tech’ replacing ‘ads’.

The show is not at all that if you stick with it for even a short while.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#363

Post by cestith »

jll29 wrote: post #265

"HCF": "In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly language mnemonic HCF, is an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. It originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers (introduced in 1964), making a joke about its…

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Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#364

Post by Altidude »

walterbell wrote: post #148
metamet wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're making me really want to start a rewatch. It's shocking how few people have seen this show, let along watched it. Part of that probably has to do with how inaccessible it is on streaming. It's only readily available on AMC+. And no one has AMC+. This is one of those shows that would likely shoot to the top if Netflix got the rights to it and even did a mild push. It's genuinely peak prestige TV.

40-episode box set is $30 ($16 today) on Apple TV.

Also free to watch on The Roku Channel: https://therokuchannel.roku.com/details/523a290683575d449483...

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#365

Post by etchalon »

Apocryphon wrote: post #110
etchalon wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Season 1 was just Mad Men but computers. Seasons 2 through 4 were vastly more interesting. We've seen Joel a hundred times. Donna and Cameron and Gordon felt less worn, and Donna and Cameron's relationship vastly more interesting than Gordon (the skeptic) and Joel (the believer!) in Season 1. If you prefer "great men" stuff, I can see preferring Season 1. But it's not exactly a story you can't watch elsewhere.

I've heard of Season 1 described as "Don Draper teaming up with Walter White", which makes it sound far more juicy than it is. The entire show gets way into the melodrama of the characters' personal lives, but S1 is no better than the rest in terms of that; it's strongest when the personal melodrama is rooted in the tech, like Joe's self-sabotage of their COMDEX demo followed by the fateful realization in the hotel r…

There just wasn't much for Gordon. He existed as a foil, or a mirror, for the other, richer characters.

I get why the writers ended up just sort of shrugging their shoulders and excluding him so often.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#367

Post by scyzoryk_xyz »

kgwxd wrote: post #204
scyzoryk_xyz wrote: post #184

Oh I've definitely heard of it. It's the Orange is the New Black for the HN adjacent crowd.

Never saw Orange is the New Black. Is it HCF for the prison adjacent crowd?

Uuuuh kinda? It's late '10's premium TV that's really more of a telenovela aimed for specific audience with a diminished level of self-awareness (not the one that's serving a sentence). HCF is kinda like that - very good if you're into the whole fantasy of tech entrepreneurship of the 80's/90's, but kinda corny when you think about it.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#368

Post by canucker2016 »

haspok wrote: post #197
rerdavies wrote: post #155

As someone who lived through that era, I couldn't watch it. A deep sense of uncanny valley. The 97% that they got completely right was ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Often senslessly so. Stuff that a technical consultant would have caught in an instant. I did rather enjoy the way that they captured the manic energy of the generation of dirtbag sales and marketing people that drove the PC industry i…

> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!

Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents.

So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip.

Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper.

After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS.

After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend.

But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console...

Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind.

For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed.

You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does).

The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing.

One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS.

But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode.

see https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-...

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#370

Post by Sylamore »

skerit wrote: post #219
tptacek wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patriot is amazing, more people should watch it, everyone I know who has was enthralled by it. Counterpart was great but structure made it hard for to watch knowing it'd been cancelled. Scavengers Reign was great; I couldn't get into Common Side Effects. Evil is exactly the Catholic X-Files, which is an amazing concept, but by the end of the 2nd season it is all the way off the rails and hurtling into a canyon. Given…

Oh, so does "Counterpart" not have an ending?

It does, though it was obviously setting up a future season things wrap up well enough. I wouldn't be mad to watch it again.
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