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Halt and Catch Fire
61–70 of 117 posts
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#62This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the every…
“It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.”
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#63When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army.
This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#64This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the every…
I feel the same way when I work on older cars.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#65I'm calling urban legend on the story of an IBM 360 catching fire from an illegal opcode.
Well, data centers catch fire all the time. And it stands to reason that an infinite loop could increase power draw and trigger a fire.
Though that still wouldn't really be the machine itself catching fire, but the building and/or wiring.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#66There's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me. They introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time. I mean, wtf. World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before. That scene near…
Mario teaches typing hadn't been invented yet!
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#67This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the every…
I'm not a slave to my computer. Stop using bad services that are designed to manipulate your behaviour. There's still the good old Internet out there with genuinely interesting content.
IPv8 and it's (eventually mandatory) device-attestation-auth-at-protocol-level will end all of this pseudoanonymous free thinking information exchange. It was good while it lasted.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#68I used to do a lot of ‘junior operator’ work in my youth, which meant functioning as a second pair of hands for the other operators.
There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s ..
Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#69It was a fun show. I really enjoyed it, a fictional run through the 80s and 90s computing industries.
I don't get why it's so praised. Everybody says it's about the rise of computing, and all I got was a shoehorned romance story with computers in the background.
Just like all those sci-fi shows where the sci-fi is only a background to family drama.
Re: Halt and Catch Fire
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they are absolutely everywhere. Most people here don’t even know what HCF. This article is nonsense and paints it like some euphemism applied to modern coding. HCF was a joke and no actual implementation was proven. Fucking bots.
Author here. I wasn't trying to imply that this is a commonly used phrase nowadays. You can see from the sources I linked, there is definitely history to HCF and even some truth to its phrase. But yes, it was mostly a joke
BikiniPrince is an AI bot account. No need to justify anything to him.