401–408 of 408 posts
“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” -- Joe MacMillan https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QeY_5n75zPM
Especially when I start to spend too much time obsessing about storage optimization, or similar. To me, sometimes, the computer is the thing. But it's really helpful to take a step back and think about the big picture.
> This piece contains spoilers for Halt and Catch Fire. I'm glad they put this at the top. I instantly closed the tab. On the off chance that the title is remotely true, I wouldn't want to have the show ruined for me before I even saw an episode. For others who have never heard of this show, here's a little I picked up from carefully scanning over the wikipedia page: It's a AMC period drama about the early days of PC…
If you're willing to consider some random username's opinion, I consider it to be possibly the best of all time TV drama, with the only alternative pick being The Wire.
I hope you enjoy it!
Good show but wouldn't want my hypothetical kid to look up to the main woman character thinking it's cool to be perpetually high-strung, antisocial, with a highly unregulated nervous system/unhealthy habits just because she is 'cool' and 'brilliant'
It's true that the characters are very flawed, but perfect characters would not make a compelling story... I guess you are talking about Cameron and not Donna, but if so I'd also say that I think the story does not really reward her, in the end.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
And, as an added bonus, as a hardware guy would know that you could read back the contents of an EPROM using the software that controls your EPROM burner (not an expensive piece of equipment). So that excuse doesn't fly either.
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…
Carl Ledbetter (one of three technical advisors) interview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719
First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before the first regular season script was written. There's only so much a technical consultant can do when he's presented with a script whose central plot point is "it's hard to reverse engineer IBM PCs". He does claim responsibility for the procedure they used to reverse engineer the BIOS, oddly. But I am inclined to be generous, and give him credit for providing the most absurdly difficult technically-plausible procedure for reverse-engineering the BIOS, and grant that the right thing to do (throw the entire script away and start again because it WASN'T difficult to reverse-engineer the BIOS) was not a pragmatic realistic recommendation for a rookie technical consultant to deliver.
To put things in perspective. There was no need to reverse engineer the BIOS at all, because the IBM Technical Manual provided exquisitely commented assembler source code for the BIOS (copyright protected), including API documentation (the essence of which is not copyright protected). And a complete set of schematics. And IBM was -- for complicated reasons -- actively encouraging third parties to build clones. So correcting the technical inaccuracies in a pilot script whose entire plot revolves around "how audaciously difficult it is to reverse an IBM PC" is a bit interesting.
Once corrected, the plot of the pilot episode would have revolved around clean-room procedures for translating API documentation into copyright-safe BIOSes. Probably not that interesting to the unwashed masses. And abstract speculation as to whether IBM would sue their pants off for IP violations, even though IBM was very publicly and loudly saying that they would not. And whether you could convince CFOs and investors that they could take IBM at their word.
The actual strategy IBM was using was pretty clever, and quite horrifyingly machiavellian (although fair and reasonable enough that nobody ever really complained about it). I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to tell the story of what happened when IBM patent attorneys showed up at our door wanting to have a discussion about a 10" thick stack of patents. Suffice it to say that I think they were playing a long game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Carl Ledbetter (one of three technical advisors) interview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719
Ledbetter actually implicitly reveals why the pilot episode was so off, interestingly. First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before…