Halt and Catch Fire
unstack.io95 points by ScottWRobinson 10 hours ago
95 points by ScottWRobinson 10 hours ago
The Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE commands, you could effectively stop the CRT raster scan, leaving the beam parked at the center of the screen. This could burn the phosphors off that spot in a matter of minutes. Not exactly HCF, but a similar vibe.
(The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)
The IBM MDA also had a 6845, and since it was driving a fixed-frequency monitor of extremely simple design, any deviation from the standard timings could definitely let the magic smoke out of the flyback transformer.
In 1978 I built a single board computer with a 6800 uP and a 6845 to drive the display. Made a keyboard for it, and it worked.
Unfortunately, in my many moves it has disappeared, though I still have the schematics for it.
Somehow I missed the boat on being a billionaire!
This 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 everyday user. There was a sense of wonder, and it didn't envelop your and everyone's life. Most of all, we weren't yet slaves to our computers, and they weren't devices crafted to endlessly grab your attention by any means necessary.
It was a fun show. I really enjoyed it, a fictional run through the 80s and 90s computing industries.
Yeah a truly fantastic show all the way through the end. One of my favorites by far.
I have to admit, when a specific person died I was feeling so bad about it I never watched the last episode. I still have it on the drive how many years later.
You should probs edit out the spoiler, or encode it somehow for others who haven't watched it yet!
Fair enough. I assumed everyone would have watched it by now from here :)
For example ... I just finished it 2-3 months back and started only because of a thread here :)
Yeah, that was a rough bit. I’ve rewatched the show and I know it’s coming and it still gets me.
It's special for sure. For those on the fence, it has some writing and direction flaws, especially with minor characters, like the disgruntled neighbor and IP theft bit in the first season. But it grows as a show over time, and the 5 leads (including Toby Huss) smooth the problems out with their talent and chemistry.
They really captured the urge to build things in tech, and the problems that come with it. HACF, Silicon Valley, and The Soul of a New Machine are a trifecta.
Agreed. This was one of the few shows that advanced the storyline quite a bit threw the seasons without jumping the shark.
Same showrunner is doing the current season of The Terror (a/k/a "North Pole Bear Show" in my review notes; that first season was excellent).
It's a shame that it is such a niche show in practice. The acting of Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis in particular are so good across all 4 seasons.
I recommend it at every chance I get, but few people ever watch it. They're more likely to give Silicon Valley a try.
Lee Pace is just bigger than life, and Mackenzie Davis is electric in every scene, but my favourite on the show was Scoot McNairy's character. A very specific type of nerd that's rarely written with such depth and nuance. Although I guess that could be said of all the main (and not so main) characters in the show.
If anyone else loved these actors watching HACF, I would recommend watching The Fall (Pace), Fargo S3 (McNairy) and Station Eleven (Davis).
All four leads are flawless and I can't really think of a single bad performance.
Same. Having experienced the growth of computing in those eras, the show itself had a very well researched yet very nostalgic sense of "oh yes. I'd forgotten about that".
Silicon Valley is also pretty good. I went in expecting not to like it (in a Big Bang Theory "about nerds but not for them" way) but came out loving it. It may read as parody to some but it barely is. It's a comedic but accurate take on west coast tech industry of the 2010s
The best part of Silicon Valley was that it had a very south park quality to it.. in that things that were actually happening at the time were parodied on the show.
Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas and then computing moving to California. It both shows mainframe, personal computers (the C64) and then beige PC taking over.
Great intro too:
> Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas […]
E.g.,
> Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty in 1951. McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI) in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941. In November 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing (L&M) division, which focused on electronic equipment.[14] By 1951, the L&M division, with its defense contracts, was growing faster than GSI's geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc. Because a firm named General Instrument already existed, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments
And how it got in contact with military contracts:
> TI entered the defense electronics market in 1942 with submarine detection equipment,[41] based on the seismic exploration technology previously developed for the oil industry. The division responsible for these products was known at different times as the Laboratory & Manufacturing Division, the Apparatus Division, the Equipment Group, and the Defense Systems & Electronics Group (DSEG).
* Ibid
Oh I'd never connected this. It makes so much sense. I'd always wondered what Texas had to do with computing that made so many things start there.
I still have it downloaded somewhere as wanted to watch it again. It was great
It really starts strong too. The first couple of episodes are fantastic.
Huh. I haven’t rewatched the show, but when I saw it originally - admittedly shortly after watching Mad Men - I thought “this is trying to be Mad Men, but it’s the '80s and in the computer industry” and interpreted Lee Pace as a laundered Don Draper.
The show is much more, and much better, than that though. I’m glad I kept watching.
That’s how I pitch it to people because it gets them to watch it, but it is definitely distinct from it. Same energy though
Complete series is at all time low on iTunes/Apple TV, 14.99:
So many AI comments. Spamming every post. Backed by AI accounts all with blogs that are less than a year old with 3-6 banal programming projects. WTF man.
Have they been removed? I’m mostly seeing comments from established accounts.
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
I'm calling urban legend on the story of an IBM 360 catching fire from an illegal opcode.
I learned the 6800 in college in Texas in the 80s, and it definely had what we called an HCF instruction. I didn't remember the opcode until I read this article.
When the show came out I thought it must have been created by one of my classmates because the title is so arcane. Turns out it wasn't but the show definitely captures the vibe of computing in Austin and Dallas in the 80s.
> I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire…
Go watch it. Great show.
Love how many people here are thinking this is about (or just taking it as an opportunity to talk about) the under-appreciated TV show!
I mean, it is the thing that made me go down this rabbit hole. Need to watch it now!
I enjoyed it a lot - certainly there's a lot of creative license and there's a slight irony in a show that's trying to portray historical events to have things like Windows 3.1 running on a Sparcstation 5 or countless others. But as someone who was of this era (maybe not so much season 1), I did love it. I actually only just got to watching it this year (and actually just started Season 4 this week).
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There'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 nearly made me quit the show right there and then.
Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.
> World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before.
Vladimir Horowitz very famously played a televised concert back in the 80s where, for the first time, a few cameras stayed focused closely on his hands. He had horrible technique. It was horrible by his own professed standard: for most of the fundamental things he himself taught to his students, he was doing the opposite! This was broadcast to millions of people. Piano teachers everywhere were pissed.
While that bad technique isn't particularly noticeable in the resulting sound for that concert, there's an analysis somewhere that shows the damage it did as he aged. You can hear certain problems he was having in his later recordings, and video from the same period confirms that the bad technique (like straining the wrist on octaves) was the culprit[1].
In any case, all kinds of world class people do all kinds of fucked up shit.
Edit:
1: In other words, when he was middle-aged he could play octaves accurately with a strained wrist, but he couldn't do that in old age. However, if he had been leveraging the weight/power of his entire arm for the octaves, he would have gotten accuracy in both cases.
2: IIRC, he didn't realize what his technique looked like until someone showed him the video. :)
At 2000s-era Google, I was fortunate to work with some famous 70s-80s era software engineers whose contributions to computing are on a similar scale to what is shown in HCF. Some of them typed with two fingers, some of them did not know or use any keyboard shortcuts.
You are looking for the wrong badge.
I'm from back then, love programming, and I can't type. Just can't be bothered learning how; it's not the bottleneck.
That feels entirely realistic for the time to me. It would certainly’ve been realistic to my formative years in the industry (a little later - turn of the century).
I still can’t ‘properly’ touch-type.
Lots of people were typing like that. As far as typing today, different layouts, hobbies with ergonomic keyboards etc we see far more people touch typing today than were in the 80's. I wouldn't call it abnormal, I was pecking - very quickly for a long time before I ever knew what vi was. I found vi on my first unix login in '85 and still pecked at it. I also know that today, with far more people typing, less of them probably gain the same knowledge as we did hacking back then. Good typing can't replace your computer knowledge. Today I never look at my keyboard, it's 36 keys and its no use looking as no symbol represents what happens when you press the key. I am a better typist, not better at software though.
When I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon
It may have been (probably was) a conscious choice illustrating how new things were (i.e. those people didn’t grow up typing to a level where it was muscle memory). Also, keyboard layouts on early machines were far from standardized (other than the qwerty letters, almost every other symbol was not in a standard location from machine to machine), so even if you knew one machine you might not know others.
Most actors and directors put a lot of thought into small details like this, so when you see something like this it’s often intentional.
You'd be surprised how many world class X often have gaps in their fundamentals. In fighting games, I often find great players don't do the technical optimization stuff I do. They're way better without it.
Keypunch operators learned to type with just their index fingers. I saw this with some older operators of the airline ticketing system at the airport years ago.
I didn't even notice that bit.
What broke the show for me was some hot peroxide blonde doing what was really done by a slightly dumpy guy in an isolated office.
I just can't watch shows that fictionalize history from my field of work. My dad's a musician and he's the same with his field.
I'm fine with that. I read the history book or watch the documentary instead.
My dad was a great programmer... who typed with a terrible two finger peck technique. It was infuriating to watch as a kid.
Typing was not a core skill. He had secretaries for that. A lot of the early typing he did was on a keypunch when an operator wasn't available; "proper" early mechanical keypunch technique was index fingers only because of the high forces involved.
My memories of the early 80's have a lot of "computer people" -- both older mainframe types like my dad, and younger people -- typing like that.
My dad was a programmer in the 70s and 80s and, to this day, he types with both middle fingers and that's it.
This article is deadbeef on arrival.
Stories like these are what endear me to my chosen career.
I suspect they hooked me with "byte" and "nybble"… And it just got better the more immersed I got in the history, Jargon Files…
In the realm of flammable computer parts and adjacent devices, there's the somewhat related lp0 on fire