Halt and Catch Fire
I heard about “Halt and Catch Fire” while walking to work a couple of months ago. The crank decided to snap on my mountain bike, and the 3 mile walk each way provided an opportunity to catch up on the podcasts I usually don't get a chance to listen to.
The show was created by the same people behind “Mad Men”, telling the story of the early days of the PC industry. Although the central story is fictional, the world it lives within is perhaps the most accurate re-creation I have seen in a TV showfrom the fonts on the IBM PC they reverse engineer, to the major historical events that cross the story arc.
Interestingly I know a guy that works for Xeroxand worked for them at the time Apple turned up and stole the crown jewels from PARC. It will be interesting to get his take on the story. I vaguely remember those years (I was still at school), but he's a few years older, and in the right place at the right timehe remembers it happening around him.
As the final episode teased the future, a group of developers were busy building an online network of sorts using the phone systemboth myself and my other half looked at each other, and at the same moment said “Compuserve”.
In many ways it's been a privilege to have lived through the era we havefrom the early home and business machines, through to the proliferation of the web, and handheld devices. Shows like “Halt and Catch Fire” remind us that the people that dreamed, designed, and built those early machines were just as talented as anybody around todayif not more so. I can't help wondering if they missed a trick by not starting the show 10 years before though, following Fredkin, Gosper, Greenblatt, Stallman, and the rest of the forgotten army that built the foundations of the giant upon whichshoulders we all now stand.