alt Hacker NewsThe problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.
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Yeah, agreed. Watching it as a drama, it’s fun. Watching it with any perspective on tech history it gets a little cringy.
The first season is semi-accurate if you just replace Compaq with their company. But it quickly goes off the rails.
It also annoyed me that the Commodore 64s used for their online service were shown with DOS prompts. I think the set designers thought "Commodore 64s are old; old computers ran DOS; therefore Commodore 64s ran DOS"
During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.
So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.
I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.