alt Hacker NewsHalt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)
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And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.
I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.
Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.
What's so great about it is:
- mushroom theory of management works - trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible - throw all the corporate bs away, just build - competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works - real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down
as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!
HACF is a goodie but there's a lot of great shows no one's heard of.
In an effort to sing the song of underappreciated works of greatness...
Patriot - a CIA hitman who writes folk songs about his exploits imdb.com/title/tt4687882/
Counterpart - not a multiverse, just a biverse imdb.com/title/tt4643084/
Scavengers Reign - Robinson Crusoe by way of a nature documentary of a very bizarre alien planet. imdb.com/title/tt21056886/
Common Side Effects - cops, robbers, magic mushrooms, corporate bad guys and the cure for everything. imdb.com/title/tt28093628
Evil - x-files meets Catholic mysticism. imdb.com/title/tt9055008/
The Heat Vision and Jack pilot episode - Jack Black, Owen Wilson and a script by Dan Harmon. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6lWgXDOAJ5s&pp=ygUUaGVhdCB2aXN...
I just finished my third run through the series. There have been a lot of movies and shows about how tech "grew up" in the 80s and 90s, but this one feels closest to home for me. It was an incredible time to live through. Everybody was trying all kinds of stuff, fundamental stuff not stuff around the edges, and nobody knew what would hit and what wouldn't. Some kid in East Minnesota had the same shot as some guy in Stanford. There was very much a Wild West feel to it.
With apologies for going all old-guy, today it seems that whatever you do, you end up in some walled garden along a pre-programmed path. Can you write an independent iOS app without spending a lot of time screwing around with Apple? I don't know. It does not look like a worthwhile thing to spend my time on.
Everything you do today, it's like you automatically end up on some set of train tracks somebody else has made. Maybe they let your train run, maybe not. Maybe they like what you're doing and let your train run like the wind so that they can copy it all.
HCF reminded me that there was a time before all of this. Good memories.
Agentic coding may be an even bigger change, and it might kick off a new time like that. Too soon to tell. I sure hope so. I can't help but notice there are a lotta folks looking to get their hooks into the system.
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 in that era.
What it missed, I though, is that it failed to capture the breathless sense of wonder at finding yourself at the center of an event around which the entire universe was going to pivot -- something that was obviously going to change everything. That's what you lived if you worked on the technical side of the PC industry.
Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine, however....
It's a tech story wrapped in a soap opera wrapped in one of the all time finest soundtracks ever played by an incredible group of actors and written by artists - it is singular!
PS - Christopher Cantwell - one of the writers and showrunners - has written a library of wonderful comic books worth investigating
PPS - ATX TV did a 10 year anniversary interview with a handful of the cast and crew that's worth watching if you're a fan - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6L1suN-mGE
I have the actual 'Cardiff Giant' laptop from the show. Got it in LA at a prop auction. Should I do a YouTube?
It's quite good, but it gets very Six Feet Under by the end, and you have to suspend a lot of disbelief about technology; it's a little like Hackers in the sense that it's trying to communicate a feeling about operating in specific eras of computing, but not so much trying to realistically depict what it was like.
Christopher Cantwell, the showrunner, is also doing the new series of The Terror (aka North Pole Bear Show) that's premiering this year.
“Computers aren’t the thing. They’re the thing that gets us to the thing.” -- Joe MacMillan
> 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 PCs and the internet. It ran from June 1, 2014 – October 14, 2017, had four seasons, reviews are good (so it's not just this guy who liked it) and they got better as the show went on. Also "it was marketed as the first TV series to premiere on Tumblr and the first time AMC had partnered with a social media service to debut a new show." which is weird, but it does seem like it's worth checking out.
I started watching this and was genuinely interested, but I kinda got tired of all the drama around the stuff I actually found interesting. I know that for a general audience, you need to pad technical stuff with scenes of the tech screwing the business guy, but I just wanted the computers!
This is one of the vanishingly small instances of actually representing the tech industry well in media, even if there's a lot of exaggeration and they elide the boring stuff. There are so many scenes in that gave me deja vu. Everyone gets treated even handedly, no 2 dimensional heroes and villains, just a load of people trying to build something while their egos get in the way. I'd give it the highest recommendation possible, representation is important!
Carl Ledbetter interview (2024), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS-k8p0dbB4
Carl was a Technical Consultant across all four seasons of Halt and Catch Fire, providing industry insight and script review. Hear what he had to say about his experience on the show, a breakdown of specific scenes, and some of his favorite memories.I genuinely enjoyed it and do recommend. As another commenter mentioned, Lee Pace's performance is stand out.
My only real critique is that it has the same problem as Mr. Robot. The writers and script are clearly very tech-literate, but the spoken lines are stilted and awkwardly delivered with odd intonation because the actors clearly have no understanding of what the words they're saying mean.
It starts as a kind of okay near-real alternate history of early computing in the Silicon Prairie, and ends with some really powerful storytelling about the fragility of humanity.
Totally worth a watch.
Does the show change after season 1? I've heard it gets much better, but I had a hard time paying that upfront cost and stopped halfway through.
This is one of those shows I've had in the rolling background rewatch queue for years, I love it and I try to recommend it to as many people as possible. Flawed, yes, but still special.
I wrote a bit about how the kind of tech culture in HACF feels more relevant in light of the LLMs even 2 years back before I heard of mourning a craft. Here's an excerpt:
One thing I liked about HACF is despite using a decent amount of technobable, it plausibly captures the approach and spirit of hacking and coding, like reverse engineering a memoryless chip by rigging up a hex LED system to read out the values for each of the 65536 inputs to a ROM.
The expertise of the coders are demonstrated mainly by others admiring the structural complexity of their code as objects of beauty. This is something that feels extra nostalgic now.
https://michaelchinen.com/2023/12/31/halt-and-catch-fire-pos...
This series is great at multiple levels:
- the archetype characters and their motivations to do what they do (100% valid today)
- struggles and exhilaration of startups
- as a pseudo-documentary of the early years of personal computing
Highly recommend it!
A great watch if you are nostalgic for the early BBS days or early WWW days. The post 2000 generation may not get it.
Binge watched it. I think the first 2 seasons were great.
Lee Pace did an awesome performance recently in Asimov's Foundation. Mackenzie Davis, another lead in the show, demonstrated good potential but she seems not to get much afterward (Terminator, Station 11 etc)
Fantastic show! Just wrote an analysis of the conflicts between the characters and how every disagreement turns into a zero sum game:
https://gilpignol.substack.com/p/halt-and-catch-fire-the-tra...
I really enjoyed that show. The last line of dialogue in the last episode is the same as the first line in the first episode IIRC.
"Halt and catch fire" is an instruction in the ic10 programming language used by the player to build automations in the game "stationeers".
One of the best shows I have ever watched. It evokes the early history (though fictional) of the personal computing revolution.
The character of Cameron Howe resonated with me greatly.
What a fantastic show.
For those who want to take a trip down memory lane about Cameron, here you go: http://www.thehoweofitall.com/
Amazing, highly recommended. I have watched all seasons ~4 times. It has just some magical feeling, because tech is in the end about people and their interactions/dynamics.
Literally this is the best show I’ve ever seen. If I’m ever burnt out at work I rewatch it
The opening of this show feels very relevant today. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucSUs3adMQ8
I tried to get my (techie) gf at the time to watch it a few years back but she couldn't get past the Cameron x Joe relationship from the beginning episode, it icked her out. I've been keen for a rewatch and my wife might actually like it though so thanks for the reminder, I'll add it to the queue.
I mistakenly posted that it's free on Samsung TV Plus. It isn't but you can watch it on Prime if you add AMC+. Sorry for the gaffe.
I've heard many great things but have not been able to make it past the classroom scene in the first episode. I love both of the actors in other media, but I find the dialogue in these opening scenes makes me feel..embarrassed? I have similar feelings about other shows and movies at times where I just have to turn them off because of the way the characters are behaving. I think it just ties directly into some anxiety I have.
Oh I've definitely heard of it. It's the Orange is the New Black for the HN adjacent crowd.
"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 numerous non-obvious instruction mnemonics." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing)
What other films/series are "must watch" material for geeks?
- War Games
- Silicon Valley
- The Social Network
- The Intern
- Mr. Robot
- Black Mirror
- Hackers
- 2001: A Space Odyssey
- ...?
Very underrated show and I hope your post gets more people to view it.
I almost stopped at the first episode. I remember the IBM PC manuals, and the build in ROM Basic, they could have read the ROMs and dumped them to the printer in minutes, there wasn't any mystery to it.
I'm glad I stuck with it though, the rest of the series was much, much better.
Look I love the show but it does feel like a missed opportunity in a lot of ways. In order to get more moments in the story itself took a backseat. Lots of cool moments if you love tech history but as a stand alone drama it was kind of a let down.
The pilot episode was so lame I almost skipped this, but the rest is just stellar.
Such a fantastic show, I re-watch this one constantly. Even did a re-watch from when they move to the Bay Area when I first moved out here!
I loved when they threw in that line in the last episode that one of their guys had invented PornHub
Loved it! It was an effective blend of different tech origin stories. Lee Pace was also excellent in "Foundation".
Yes, hands down the best show! They need to do more seasons, especially with modern day problems.
Other thoughtful and well made shows: Dark Matter, For All Mankind, Foundation (also Lee Pace and also stellar).
Absolutely. If you weren't there for it, watch this. If you really want to understand AI, here it is. Hilarious. "Nobody ever got fired for AI".
I have been trying to find that opcode ever since I discovered the show. :)
One of my all time favorite series - add my upvote to the pile!
watched it many times - one of the best series on this subject.
Yeah this is a gem of a show worth a rewatch every few years. Especially once it finds its legs after S1. Criminally underrated.
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My all-time favorite. Compaq had a compelling story, and I liked where the writers went after the first season.
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 screen.
edit - a great example and one of my favorite scenes from the show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOR8mk0tLpc