If you are looking for something to binge watch this weekend and maybe pick up a little tech knowledge, I’ve got a show for you: Halt and Catch Fire (check link for nerdy/cool meaning). It begins by following the PC wars of the early 80’s. 4 seasons chronicle the cast’s ups and downs as they navigate a decade working in the tech industry. Always on the bleeding edge, they put their skills to the test jumping at opportunities to beat out competition. Their challenges range from building an impossible portable computer, to creating a competition-crushing web indexing site.
Although the main characters have attributes clearly meant to mirror those of some of the big players in the tech industry (Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John Carmack/Romero, to name a few). While they are extremely dramatized, a lot of the show follows very real events and real tech companies.
The first season is loosely based on the rise of Compaq computers. A former-spurned IBM employee seeks out a coder savant, and a genius computer engineer. Together they set out to topple the computer giant by reverse-engineering the BIOS of what is currently the industry-standard IBM computer. In real life this was actually done by several Texas Instruments employees who became fed up with the direction of their company. The BIOS was the only part of the IBM computer that was protected from copying by law. IBM was famously late to get their computer program off the ground and rushed their PC into production using off-the-shelf parts. This is what allowed both the characters in the show and the entrepreneurs in real life to achieve their goal.
The machine code for the BIOS was published in the computer manual so anyone who ever looked at it was forbidden by law to write code that could replicate IBM’s software. The process of reverse engineering was tedious. One coder would go through the published computer code and write a summary of what each function did. This summary was then passed to another coder, who could have no contact with the first. The second coder would then write original code that would achieve the function the first coder had laid out in the summary. Compaq became one of the most successful computer companies in history, just as its fictitious counterpart in Halt and Catch Fire, Cardiff Electric.
If all this tech talk makes you think this show is not for you, fear not. What makes the show great are the characters. They’re eccentric, flawed and volatile, yet lovable. They progress and grow through out the series and you always want to see what success or failure they achieve or must endure next. It’s on Netflix so check it out.