Effin A. I knew Joe was gonna pull some sh*t.
So, they just kind of hit the reset button, no? And now we’re dreaming about the online era - with what sounds like the first online social thing like Prodigy, Quantumlink, and the like?
AMC put the entire first season up online for free. (as long as you have cable provider info)
I definitely think the prior couple of episodes were stronger then the finale. It feels like things got cut. Overall I enjoyed the series. Definitely great to watch if you’re in the tech industry, hardware or software. There’s a lot to relate to IMO. I would be OK if the series ended or continued at this point.
[spoilers]
The whole van burning had zero consequences which was very odd.
I got a kick out of the “We need a killer app” brainstorming session.
Where was Joe going at the end?
What was the point of the car robbery? To show Gordon that he can’t live without his wife?
[/spoilers]
The season finale continued to walk the show’s equivocal line about brash innovation vs. faster/cheaper/smaller.
We do leave Cameron full of youth, hope, and buzzwords that seem perfectly primed for the future. But those who were around at the time will understand that she’s basically pitching
before its time
the Sierra Network, only ten years earlier. So no decent graphics, slower speeds, etc. (And BBS software already existed in '83, so she’s going to be up against a bunch of hobbyists giving it away for free.)
Cameron may indeed be the future … but in the tech biz the future is always paved with startups that have cool ideas that don’t quite pan out when or how you think.
The characters’ reaction to the 1984 Mac ad the season had been building up to was also interesting. Both Gordon and Joe saw it as a harbinger of the future … but both of them were wrong. The Mac was not a gimmick, but neither was it the thing that slew IBM. (It was the clones that did that, just as Joe was saying at the start of the season.) It’s refreshing to see a series where nobody has the kind of perfect foresight that Hollywood likes every historical drama to have.
For Jazar
[spoiler]The point of the car robbery was the reverse of deux ex machina. It was the writers gratuitously pissing on their characters to get the thematic result they wanted: these characters are not permitted to have nice things. Lazy writing and the worst scene of the series.
The van thing did have consequences: Joe burned all his bridges in Texas and fled (just as he’d done before fleeing to Texas …)
At the end he was (I think) going to go visit his mom, who was the one in the observatory.[/spoiler]
If I recall correctly, Tandy actually did. It did not excatly take off.
Renewed for a second season.
— Alan
I believe you’re right. Tandy did a lot of unadvised things.
— Alan
Whew! I thought the silence by AMC there at the end of the season meant that the show was a one and done deal.
Glad to hear it! I’m interested to see where they take the characters.
The first season is on Netflix now for those who haven’t seen it. I’m about halfway through it now and I quite like it, though I often want to reach through the screen and slap the shit out of, well, everyone.
I liked it a lot too. Really does a better job of conveying “early-mid 80’s” (to me anyway) than The Americans (which I love, don’t get me wrong).
I binge watched this over a week or so from my DVR. As an IT guy who started his career in the early 90’s, I actually worked on a lot of IBM 8086 and 8088 machines as well as early 286 clones at my first job. I can remember the huge platters in the hard drives (when 10MB was considered a decent drive, and 20MB was downright beefy!). I remember installing “hard cards”, which were basically 20MB hard drives on an 8-bit slot card (double your hard drive space!). I remember flipping dip switches on an arcnet NIC to assign a network address by hand (consulting our chart of existing address assigned of course). Much of the tech in the show predates my career by a little, but was still around when I started. I even remember the Compaq “luggables” they mentioned, suitcase looking things with a tiny 8" amber CRT built into the case. Laptops they were NOT. ;-)
So the nostalgia aspect of this show hit me right in the soft spot. I loved it. The characters took some time to grow on me, but near the end I was rooting for all of them, even Joe. The COMDEX episodes were a glorious way to end the season. Seeing COMDEX in all it’s 80’s geeky glory was awesome. Even into the early 90’s it was a well known industry “secret” that the porn convention coincided with COMDEX so anyone lucky enough to get their company to send them to the latter would come back with stories about the former. Seeing that represented in the show made me laugh.
Halt and Catch Fire is a great series for anyone even remotely related to the computer industry. It’s not exactly a documentary on how the IBM clones were built, but it’s close enough and full of some great acting and scripting. I suspect the show falls flat with non-tech audiences, but it must have done relatively well overall since it’s coming back for a second season. I wonder what they’ll build in season two?!
I’m actually alternating between episodes of the first season The Americans and HCF (though I took a break from both over the weekend to binge on Daredevil). They’re obviously very different shows, but seeing two different perspectives on the same time period is pretty fun. I would generally agree with you, though I think that mostly comes down to the soundtrack. There’s some great 80’s music moments in the first season of The Americans, but I feel like they’re fewer and fewer as I get further into the series. HCF is more consistently awesome and memorable with it’s use of 70’s and 80’s music.
I’d say it’s great for someone like me who was one of their customers at the time as well. I wasn’t in the industry, but I was a relatively early adopter. And ya’ll needed someone besides yourselves to sell to.
While perhaps not as well crafted as Mad Men, I think that the comparisons to it as a period piece are well-placed. And for me it hit closer to home, since I was an infant in the 1960’s but I was in college and scooping up PC hardware in the 80’s. I think they did a decent job of establishing the setting and time. I understood maybe 70% of what they were talking about when they talked tech, and I suspect that much of the rest was BS filler. It’s not an epic heroic tale of Steve Woz or Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but ultimately PC clones are what made computers ubiquitous, and this is as good of a fictionalized story of that as I’ve seen…since basically none have been made so far.
[edit] - very glad to see it renewed for at least 1 more season. I really liked the final shot…I was thinking the same thing at the close.
Can we make fun of the new season yet? It looks like they’re doing a games-thing, which could be execrable. On the other hand, the hookers-and-blow type stories about the early moneyhat Atari days are pretty amazing.
The second season premieres tonight, right?
Cont’d:
And indeed it did. The first scene still set in '83 presumably, followed by the scene set at the chaotic business that Cameron and ? (blanking on the character’s name, Gordon Clark’s wife) had set up were establishing ones, and the second (I thought) went on a bit long and was a little heavy-handed in showing how anarchic the whole outfit was. The episode picked up a lot of momentum during the “meet the fence” scene and by the time it was done I was actually interested in seeing where the writers take this season.
Caught the 2nd season premiere. The second scene with the wacky hijinks at the startup was awful, pretty much a dictionary of programmer cliches. But once past that the episode found its groove and I was once more drawn into the world and its characters.
I love the attention to detail in the show - the period detail, of course (like how ungodly expensive an XT was) but also the fictional detail. Someone put a lot of thought into that list of Cardiff Electric shareholders, for example.
My initial thought was that the startup was way too ahead of its time, but a lot of it lines up. BBS were proliferating like mushrooms in '85, and some of them charged for access. Lucasarts launched Habitat in '86. Other parts were less plausible … like a half meg Backgammon program (most PCs didn’t have 640k yet.) I’m also not sure that anyone talked about “lag” in '85.
Like it so far. I think I’m in love with Donna.
Ah, that’s Gordon’s wife’s name. Yeah, Kerry Bishé’s a serious babe all right.
$5 an hour to game takes me back to when I played Dragonrelams on Prodigy. Stupid amounts of money on that game.