27 ms·

Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus

480 points by gammarator 6y ago

devoutsalsa 6y ago
I loved this show. It made me wish I had gotten into tech much earlier!
aurelius12 6y ago
So weird. Had just finished s3e4 for the second time through when I saw this.
- kirubakaran 6y ago
  The world is full of coincidences.
vimy 6y ago
Halt and Catch Fire is an excellent show. I wish Apple would make a similar show about the first Macintosh. There’s plenty of material on folklore.org for a good story.
- thirtyseven 6y ago
  Do you trust Apple to make such a show without making it a hagiography?
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    A hackiography, surely.
- taneq 6y ago
  Folklore.org is such a wonderful read, I'd love to see a faithful TV adaptation. I also really enjoyed Accidental Empires (which was later made into a documentary, Triumph of the Nerds).
- the_af 6y ago
  Have you watched the (pretty good) documentary "General Magic"? If features a lot of the same people than folklore.org, to the point one could consider it an Apple "side story", though there are also future Googlers and people who built Android. Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo I found it interesting. There is a bit of hagiography going on, though (and note the trailer seems way more antagonistic towards Sculley than the documentary actually is.) One thing I found striking is that none of these people seem to need or care about money. They say so explicitly, "we didn't care about the money", and that it was all about the vision and passion. Yet somehow they managed to remain clothed and well fed. If that's not the definition of privilege, I don't know what is!
raybb 6y ago
First time I'm hearing about it. According to Wikipedia the show is well loved but just didn't get much viewership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...
- Barrin92 6y ago
  fantastic show. For people who like the 80s/90s tech setting as well as just a plain good drama.
- fossuser 6y ago
  It's really great and one of the rare ones that's great until the end, and it ends purposefully and well. My only comment about it is the first handful of episodes are the weakest. After the first half of the first season they tone down the Joe MacMillan character to be less of a kind of over the top trope anti-hero and more of a real character with depth and things get better. They're not bad early on, but you'd probably notice that and it's worth watching anyway.
  - tompagenet2 6y ago
    I totally agree with this, and it marks the first series for me a bit. The setting and concept are great, but Joe is a pastiche and until they calm his character down he's not very believable. He gets too much screen time and the expense of other, better characters. As you say, it's not bad, just it hasn't grown into itself. The last series is both excellent and poignant. The group always being just a bit too early with their ideas creates a sense of innovation but it's also tinged with failure which I think really works.
    - itsoktocry 6y ago
      >Joe is a pastiche and until they calm his character down he's not very believable Whether is was intentional or not, I think the way Joe moves into a more "believable" role worked well from a character development standpoint. Like, the cookie-cutter sales person isn't going to fly in SV (or Texas), and he was fooling himself anyway.
whoisthemachine 6y ago
Great show, neat idea!
libraryofbabel 6y ago
This is a superb set of resources for anyone interested in the history of computing in the 80s and 90s. I'd go so far as to say it's great even if you don't intend to watch the show (although you should!). I wish this had existed back when I was teaching history of technology. One of the best decisions the show made was to set the series at a series of fictitious minor companies and startups struggling down there in the trenches of the computer revolution without ever quite making it big. This avoids the trap of teleology and gives you a sense of how things could easily have turned out differently. It is why the show is so much better as both computing history and drama than all those films about Apple or Steve Jobs and the rest that tediously rehash the same stories of the winners. (Although one of the main characters, Joe Macmillan, has some Jobs-like character features. I do not mean this as a compliment.)
- GTP 6y ago
  I didn't watch (yet) Halt and Catch Fire, but given your description, I think you would like Silicon Valley too. There the protagonist has a big idea but struggles to make it a real product. Also the jokes told there make it both really funny and interesting, because there's always something true about them.
  - noir_lord 6y ago
    Have watched both, very different shows but brilliant in their own way. The first season of HCF in particular was spectacular (the others are still amazing but for a first season HCF smashed it out the park).
    - kemiller2002 6y ago
      I completely agree. Seasons 2,3,4 were great, but the first one was amazing on how it portrayed the feel of the time, the struggle, everything. They could have stopped at season 1 and I wouldn't have been disappointed.
      - YuccaGloriosa 6y ago
newswasboring 6y ago
Am I the only one who doesn't like the show? I have seen everything upto S4E3 (or somewhere around that), and I must say its just horrible people with very few redeeming qualities. Its a difficult men show (yes Cameron is also a difficult Man), and I get that those are popular with people. But every other show like that that I actually like is more... fun. This one is just grim and dark and unrelenting in its difficult men tropes.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  It's definitely a prestige melodrama which makes it maudlin. One could recommend HBO's Silicon Valley as an antidote, but that's a comedy with cynical bittersweet tones. Perhaps one day someone will make a tech industry drama that's light and optimistic.
  - newswasboring 6y ago
    Its not just that, the series feels disingenuous. Like nothing can go right for the main characters, ever. Whenever they achieve something, they have to be knocked down. Never once in the series did anyone have a moment of happiness which is not punished. Like, as soon as you get your exit money, BAM brain problems! Successfully convert a idle mainframe into a time share business, NOPE it will be stolen from you. I feel like they are conflating sadness with grit and unnecessarily concentrating only on the sad/difficult parts. As a counter example, look at breaking bad or better call saul. Breaking Bad is perhaps the most successful prestige show since Sopranos (I think it might be even more successful if only looked at commercially). But the show has fun with its universe. Even The Wire, which is a show about everything that can go wrong with the city has moment which feel human and are not sad/difficult.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm definitely not a fan of the ways they put them through the wringer- Gordon's health issues were a particular excessive twist of the knife. Interestingly enough, that description sort of describes Silicon Valley's trajectory for its protagonists as well. Could it just be that showrunners don't know what to do with their characters once they find success, especially in the potentially extremely lucrative world of tech? Amusingly enough, I remember this 2015 article comparing the two, as well as Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, when both shows were still on their early seasons: https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/ https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-ha...
Mountain_Skies 6y ago
As others have also mentioned, the biggest sin the show commits is having the main characters invent so much. It's certainly not unknown for a person or a group that innovate in multiple fields but for them to innovate in so many was a bit of a stretch but one that was acceptable for storytelling purposes. An alternate could have been to fade characters in and out over the seasons. Joe and Gordon are the stars of the PC-clone season, with Cameron and Donna playing supporting roles. In the Online Services season, Cameron and Donna step forward while Joe and Gordon become secondary characters and characters such as Yo-Yo and Tom increase their presence. Season three could have had Cameron and Donna fall back to secondary characters while Yo-Yo and Tom became the main characters in creating a what would essentially be something like Sierra Online or Electronic Arts. Each season could have introduced a new period of tech and introduced new minor characters that would be the center of the next season. For continuity, the common thread in all of the companies could have been Boz, moving from company to company in a sales and business development role. This way the show could have continued on though to present day and even taken a branch here and there during periods of higher than typical innovation. The big downside is that you end up rotating out some very talented actors. All of the main cast of the show as filmed were really good and it would have been a shame to lose that but the storytelling would have been better for it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  Your approach might work for the tech-oriented audience members, but the character development and ongoing drama is what makes the show appealing to people who don't care about the tech. It's part of what makes the show brilliant.
- prepend 6y ago
  The way I look at it is that tech frequently has people inventing the same approach over and over. So this actually happens, just it’s not always the version that takes off. Sometimes I shrug when someone says “I invented Facebook in 1990.” But sometimes that happens, although people don’t normally talk about it in public. I’ve worked with co-workers who “invented” aspect oriented programming, Jenkins, ajax, nosql sui generis. A few years later in each case I remember thinking “oh yeah this is what John Doe” was building. So I just chalked this up to people in this company “inventing” mobile computers, dial-up communities, and portals at the same time as compaq, prodigy, and yahoo.
pkd 6y ago
Great work and I am glad this show is building a cult following. I consider the later 3 seasons of the show as the third best TV series I have seen in the past decade (behind only True Detective S1 and Chernobyl). If you have been struggling with the first season, consider sticking with it!
- ekianjo 6y ago
  Are the series technical or rather vague in that regard? If they are, how accurate are they?
  - querulous 6y ago
    i found it very accurate technically if not historically. it doesn't really linger on the technical aspects though, it's very much just used as window dressing
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      I found it fairly believable, if not completely accurate, in both aspects. Most of the things in the show are things that actually happened in real life, just with the serial numbers filed off. For instance, Cardiff Electric is basically fake Compaq, Comet is basically fake Yahoo!, and Rover is like fake Google. There's even a reference to the Morris worm. Sure, fake Google comes a little early in the timeline, and Mutiny doesn't exactly map to anything that's familiar to me, but it all feels like it could have happened. Verisimilitude is really what matters here, and they pull it all off to an absolute T. On the technical aspects, I loved when Donna got to do her thing those couple of times and do data recovery on disks. I wish they had been able to give her a bigger role in the early part of the series, because her character really shines when allowed to. And, we have to mention the set design. It's perfect, right down to the little touches, like Donna and Gordon's J.C. Penney TV, or the Yars' Revenge poster hanging up in the Mutiny frat house. Sometimes I literally watch the show just to look at the sets.
      - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
dreamcompiler 6y ago
I've probably said this before, but I was a computer engineer in Texas in the 80s and this show captures that culture perfectly.* I first learned "Halt and Catch Fire" as an obscure illegal instruction on the 6800 processor that would lock it up. When I heard about this show my first reaction was "How dare they title a show with a meme from an obscure part of my hindbrain! Guess I can't use that for a password any more." *Well almost perfectly. I don't remember many engineers or coders being as attractive as the actors on this show.
- jorvi 6y ago
  > *Well almost perfectly. I don't remember many engineers or coders being as attractive as the actors on this show. This always amuses me about American-produced shows. Even the guy cast as 'background hobo #2' is a handsome person with token dirt and ragged clothes applied.
  - scandox 6y ago
    This was always true for female actors, but up to about the late 1970s male actors - even leading ones - could have any kind of head on them ... Some wonderfully charismatic ugliness going on. I think the pendulum will swing back eventually. I hope.
  - prepend 6y ago
    I worked for a startup and we had a programming intern in my shop who was a new mom who wanted to learn programming. She was also an ex model from Denmark or Belgium or somewhere. She was really pretty, prettier than the actors on Halt and Catch Fire, and got a ton of attention from the rest of the programmers who were almost all typical programmers. [0] She was doing well as a programmer when the company folded. Other than this one programmer, I’ve never seen any programmers or product managers or engineers as attractive as in this show. [0] “In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls “the compulsion to program.” He describes the afflicted as “bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken, glowing eyes,” who play out “megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence” at computer consoles; they sit at their machines, he writes, “their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice.” ― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine -
minhaz23 6y ago
im happy this is getting more attention and a discussion now, i looked at it friday night and it had no discussion or upvotes just bad timing i guess but i was blown away by how well thought out and executed the authors work is, thank you for bringing it to others' attention. i hope they get some use out of it, i definitely got inspiration from it
danso 6y ago
Very nice. Built on Jekyll, apparently: https://github.com/ablwr/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus https://github.com/ablwr/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus
- ablwr 6y ago
  Ya! Although extreeeeeemely kludgy, I did so many hacky things -- definitely could not be used as a template for anything else and is a bit weird/embarrassing. I'll pretend it's an homage to the 90s web even though it's actually just laziness. ;) I initially started with GatsbyJS/React, but it was stopping me from getting to what I needed to do (CSS + content). So even though I was going to start with full JS, it ended up JS-free (I don't use any trackers), which also saved me from having to jump through the right hoops to be more accessibility-friendly!
hardwaresofton 6y ago
If you liked Halt and Catch Fire and the music therein, make sure to check out the soundtrack, it's available on bandcamp[0]. I listen to it when I want ~medium to high focus when working, and sometimes to get me "in the mood" so to speak. [0]: https://paulhaslinger.bandcamp.com/album/halt-and-catch-fire-original-television-series-soundtrack https://paulhaslinger.bandcamp.com/album/halt-and-catch-fire...
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Speaking of music, while this show has so many amazing things going for it, one of the best is the intro sequence and the theme music. That puts it on rare footing with shows like Mad Men and Covert Affairs. I know Netflix puts this button on everything, but I never use the "Skip Intro" button on these series.
  - Foxboron 6y ago
    I had to look up the guy that actually designed it, and I realized they have pretty much made all the intro cinematics I adore from TV shows. Westworld, American Gods, Man in the High Castle and Halt and Catch Fire. https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/raoul-marks/ https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/raoul-marks/ https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/halt-and-catch-fire/ https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/halt-and-catch-fire/
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Huh, really. I haven't gotten around to watching American Gods, and Westworld isn't my thing, but I also enjoyed the title sequence for The Man in the High Castle. It isn't one of the ones I'd watch every time, just because it's so chilling, but I do very much enjoy it. The show itself was incredible, of course, and also has a bit of a chilling feeling to it. It's a perfect fit.
      - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
        Nice thing about the title sequence for The Man in the High Castle is that it doubles as an prologue in setting the story. Much nicer than having to read (or have narrated) a background story to get things started.
vincent-manis 6y ago
The strange thing is that the “instruction” Halt and Catch Fire originated in a joke System/360 “green card” (reference summary) from the 1960s, along with Rewind and Break Tape, Execute (or Punch) Operator, and many others I've long since forgotten. Reference is sometimes made to an undocumented Motorola 6800 instruction, but the term is from the Big Iron era, and has nothing to do with personal computing. It's really from the "Blinkenlichts" era, when people commonly put up cartoons in the machine room showing a floating-point adder as a snake in a birdbath. By the way, Big Iron's abilities in the physical world were real. I occasionally operated a System/360 with 4 2311 disk drives, 7.5MB monsters with the form factor of washing machines. When running the IBM sort program, these clunkers were apt to move around the machine room.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  > when people commonly put up cartoons in the machine room showing a floating-point adder as a snake in a birdbath. I really want to see this, can't find it by googling though. Maybe you know where to find it?
  - vincent-manis 6y ago
    The last time I saw that one was in the University of British Columbia 7044 machine room, circa 1969. It was part of an “Anatomy of a Computer” cartoon, with a number of other visual puns. The adder is the only one I remember. Have never seen it online, alas.
    - cmsefton 6y ago
      Interestingly, looking around for this cartoon led me to these two specimens showing adders in chip and circuit design: https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/fulladder.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/fulladder.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/halfadder.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/halfadder.html
- rootbear 6y ago
  Our CS department newsletter once had cartoons featuring snakes illustrating both adders and half-adders, the latter being the victim of an ax.
adamredwoods 6y ago
Back in the 80's my brother and I would type in programs from a computer magazine called "Compute's Gazette" which was mainly for the Commodore 64. I remember typing in a variant of code that was similar to assembly (they coined it MLX), and included checksums at the end of each line to make sure we typed it in correctly. We spent many hours typing it in and playing these "lite" games. https://kotaku.com/load-great-memories-8-1-5930961 https://kotaku.com/load-great-memories-8-1-5930961 https://archive.org/stream/1983-12-compute-magazine/Compute_Issue_043_1983_Dec#page/n215/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/1983-12-compute-magazine/Compute_... I have to admit I really miss the days of being able to type in a game from a book (meh.... not really).
- prepend 6y ago
  I remember doing this from Byte magazine, or at least I think I do. I didn’t have a hard drive so I would spend all day typing in the program, run it and lose it when the computer shut down. I remember being mad when my sibling would turn off the computer unexpectedly.
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  > typing in a variant of code that was similar to assembly And in case you didn't have a disk drive, the magazine included the BASIC source code listing of the program that you had to type _those_ programs into.
stevecalifornia 6y ago
I have watched all four seasons seven times. This show is so good I don't recommend it to my friends because I'm not sure I could handle it if they didn't like it as much as myself. If you haven't seen the show, watch season 1 episode 1. If you don't like it, this isn't your show. You don't have to invest 20 hours of your life 'to get to the good season'. It's all good right from the start.
- yumraj 6y ago
  I loved the first time I watched it. However, when I started watching it again, I could not - while I absolutely loved the show, it always left me a little sad for them.. I may have to try again..
  - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
    Same here. I made it part of the way through season one a second time but lost my patience for most of the relationship drama. It was fine the first time through, so I don't think it was a poor choice to have it in the show, but it does reduce its rewatch value.
  - psalminen 6y ago
    This is one of the few shows where I've hated every main character at different times throughout the series. I just started my second time through and I'm interest to see if I feel the same.
- weaksauce 6y ago
  yeah it really is one of my favorite shows out there. really great
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Non-spoiler alert: you might just have to grit your teeth and hang on through the first few seconds, where the armadillo gets run over.
  - jonny383 6y ago
hnlmorg 6y ago
If you guys liked Halt and Catch Fire, I'd also like to recommend: - Pirates of Silicon Valley (this largely follows Gates and Jobs): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/ - Micro Men (this is about the British tech scene in the 80s): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/
- prepend 6y ago
  Also Valley of the Boom [0] by National Geographic focusing on Netscape, Pixelon, and a couple others. And General Magic [1] - a documentary about the startup General Magic with interviews with early employees who went on to Apple, Google, etc And Silicon Cowboys [2] - documentary about Compaq in the early days, pretty much the real story version of Season 1 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Boom [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/ [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/
__exit__ 6y ago
Really great set of resources! Bookmarked! Also a great companion to rewatch the series! BTW, does anynone know where I could buy the complete series on bluray or dvd? I loved watching the show on TV at its time, but cannot find all the seasons to buy and rewatch.
jhbadger 6y ago
While there were interesting things about the show, like how Joe manipulated Gordon and others much like many stories of how Steve Jobs acted, there were just so many inaccuracies that annoyed the hell out of me. For example, the C64s were shown to have C:> prompts like DOS machines, probably because the set designers thought that all "old" computers worked that way and were too young to actually know the era.
- ido 6y ago
  My favorite is at some point in the last season they show a 286 booting up with more than 16mb RAM (the real world maximum that CPU supports). I can't help but think this is an intentional easter egg.
dusted 6y ago
Loved the show, and this website looks awesome and seems to contain a massive wealth of information on computing history, bookmarked! Probably my only beef with this show is when he dumps the rom using switches and LEDs, sure you could do that, but you could also be reasonable, and hook it up to a computer and write a lil program to dump it, when you're that smart anyway..
larrydag 6y ago
One of the most underrated shows in the last decade. This show isn't supposed to be a narrative history of a computer company. This show is to encompass the vigor, innovation, power struggle, paradigm shift of the 80's and 90's of the computing revolution. I was just a kid when all of this began and grew up during this era. This show does a great job of showing the excitement during that time. Everyone knew back at that time something was brewing with technology and it seemed there was something new and exciting every month. It was also a battle for supremacy to see who was going to lead the revolution. A very fascinating part of tech history.
prepend 6y ago
There’s a quote [0] by Lee Pace in the last season that I remember as both the best description of the Internet as well as explains my love in the mid 90s when I first started using the web... “ When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we went through the Holland Tunnel, and it was basic. Concrete and steel. But it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat, wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge. It was the explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of the trip the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending. This is the first Web browser,” I love this show so much. I worked for a bunch of misses and I like seeing a description of the times that were so important, but not told by the winners. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5707526/characters/nm1195855 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5707526/characters/nm1195855
racl101 6y ago
The show started off great in the first season but then it became harder to believe as it went on that a rag tag group of people were at the almost at the forefront of all these technological revolutions in computers. I get that it's fiction but still .... you gotta keep it somewhat believable. It would've been better if, much like Forrest Gump, all these revolutions happened in the background but they weren't necessarily at the forefront of them.
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
resubmit from days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873949
ChrisArchitect 6y ago
This is well done for sure, and I love HACF but already watched live and rewatched so not going to go back, but it's nice to connect alot of the materials and background that came up while we were all watching the show
spamizbad 6y ago
I absolutely love this "vintage" web design. The author's page[1] is very impressive and I love the atheistic. Wish more creative people in the industry would take design risks like this. [1] https://ashleyblewer.com/ https://ashleyblewer.com/
- mprime1 6y ago
  Then I recommend checking out the Indie web webring https://indieweb.org/webring https://indieweb.org/webring
- ablwr 6y ago
  thank you so much!! CSS is so good these days, thanks to the dedicated and hard work of standards authors. I recommend that anyone who has been driven into a blind rage trying to do something simple like center divs give CSS another shot now that we have CSS Grid.
vages 6y ago
I can't seem to stream this in my country, and the entire series is not available on physical media. Ten years ago, I would have been able to buy this show on physical media from abroad. Now, if no streaming provider purchased the television show rights, I can't get it. And there's not enough purchasing power to produce a physical version of it. Isn't this globalization in reverse? For the record: I live in Norway. Please let me know if there is any way to see the series.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Looks like only the first two seasons have been published on physical media so you're stuck with less than legal methods of watching it.
anonymousiam 6y ago
Because nobody has yet mentioned anything related to the title for this series, here's the explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...
bishnu 6y ago
If you enjoy this series I really recommend reading The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It's 40 years old but still the best book I have ever read about what motivates engineers (not entrepeneurs - there are tons of books about that - but rank-and-file engineers). Actually, the first season of H&CF cribs a lot from the book (from the overall plot to a few very specific anecdotes).
nwsm 6y ago
I liked the first season a lot but got kind of annoyed when they started just having the main characters invent basically everything from tech history. That being said, I had a good time watching with my mom who is also in technology, and getting her insights on the references and depiction of 80s tech. She thought it was/is very well done.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dualboot 6y ago
That this show never had a single Emmy nomination is an absolute crime. The ensemble cast was phenomenal. They delivered believable, vulnerable, and often completely frustrating performances. I'm a sucker for period character-driven drama and there are few shows that do it as well as HACF did. I was drawn in by Lee Pace and my extreme nostalgia for the early days of PC computing. I stayed because I fell in love with the characters. You can pick apart the technical side of it all day(jwz did) but you would entirely be missing the point, at least in my opinion. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/11/if-only-i-knew-it-was-so-simple/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/11/if-only-i-knew-it-was-so-si...

480 points by gammarator 6y ago

devoutsalsa 6y ago

I loved this show. It made me wish I had gotten into tech much earlier!

aurelius12 6y ago

So weird. Had just finished s3e4 for the second time through when I saw this.

kirubakaran 6y ago
The world is full of coincidences.

vimy 6y ago

Halt and Catch Fire is an excellent show. I wish Apple would make a similar show about the first Macintosh. There’s plenty of material on folklore.org for a good story.

thirtyseven 6y ago
Do you trust Apple to make such a show without making it a hagiography?
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  A hackiography, surely.
taneq 6y ago
Folklore.org is such a wonderful read, I'd love to see a faithful TV adaptation. I also really enjoyed Accidental Empires (which was later made into a documentary, Triumph of the Nerds).
the_af 6y ago
Have you watched the (pretty good) documentary "General Magic"? If features a lot of the same people than folklore.org, to the point one could consider it an Apple "side story", though there are also future Googlers and people who built Android. Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo I found it interesting. There is a bit of hagiography going on, though (and note the trailer seems way more antagonistic towards Sculley than the documentary actually is.) One thing I found striking is that none of these people seem to need or care about money. They say so explicitly, "we didn't care about the money", and that it was all about the vision and passion. Yet somehow they managed to remain clothed and well fed. If that's not the definition of privilege, I don't know what is!

raybb 6y ago

First time I'm hearing about it. According to Wikipedia the show is well loved but just didn't get much viewership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(TV_series...

Barrin92 6y ago
fantastic show. For people who like the 80s/90s tech setting as well as just a plain good drama.
fossuser 6y ago
It's really great and one of the rare ones that's great until the end, and it ends purposefully and well. My only comment about it is the first handful of episodes are the weakest. After the first half of the first season they tone down the Joe MacMillan character to be less of a kind of over the top trope anti-hero and more of a real character with depth and things get better. They're not bad early on, but you'd probably notice that and it's worth watching anyway.
- tompagenet2 6y ago
  I totally agree with this, and it marks the first series for me a bit. The setting and concept are great, but Joe is a pastiche and until they calm his character down he's not very believable. He gets too much screen time and the expense of other, better characters. As you say, it's not bad, just it hasn't grown into itself. The last series is both excellent and poignant. The group always being just a bit too early with their ideas creates a sense of innovation but it's also tinged with failure which I think really works.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >Joe is a pastiche and until they calm his character down he's not very believable Whether is was intentional or not, I think the way Joe moves into a more "believable" role worked well from a character development standpoint. Like, the cookie-cutter sales person isn't going to fly in SV (or Texas), and he was fooling himself anyway.

whoisthemachine 6y ago

Great show, neat idea!

libraryofbabel 6y ago

This is a superb set of resources for anyone interested in the history of computing in the 80s and 90s. I'd go so far as to say it's great even if you don't intend to watch the show (although you should!). I wish this had existed back when I was teaching history of technology. One of the best decisions the show made was to set the series at a series of fictitious minor companies and startups struggling down there in the trenches of the computer revolution without ever quite making it big. This avoids the trap of teleology and gives you a sense of how things could easily have turned out differently. It is why the show is so much better as both computing history and drama than all those films about Apple or Steve Jobs and the rest that tediously rehash the same stories of the winners. (Although one of the main characters, Joe Macmillan, has some Jobs-like character features. I do not mean this as a compliment.)

GTP 6y ago
I didn't watch (yet) Halt and Catch Fire, but given your description, I think you would like Silicon Valley too. There the protagonist has a big idea but struggles to make it a real product. Also the jokes told there make it both really funny and interesting, because there's always something true about them.
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Have watched both, very different shows but brilliant in their own way. The first season of HCF in particular was spectacular (the others are still amazing but for a first season HCF smashed it out the park).
  - kemiller2002 6y ago
    I completely agree. Seasons 2,3,4 were great, but the first one was amazing on how it portrayed the feel of the time, the struggle, everything. They could have stopped at season 1 and I wouldn't have been disappointed.
    - YuccaGloriosa 6y ago

newswasboring 6y ago

Am I the only one who doesn't like the show? I have seen everything upto S4E3 (or somewhere around that), and I must say its just horrible people with very few redeeming qualities. Its a difficult men show (yes Cameron is also a difficult Man), and I get that those are popular with people. But every other show like that that I actually like is more... fun. This one is just grim and dark and unrelenting in its difficult men tropes.

Apocryphon 6y ago
It's definitely a prestige melodrama which makes it maudlin. One could recommend HBO's Silicon Valley as an antidote, but that's a comedy with cynical bittersweet tones. Perhaps one day someone will make a tech industry drama that's light and optimistic.
- newswasboring 6y ago
  Its not just that, the series feels disingenuous. Like nothing can go right for the main characters, ever. Whenever they achieve something, they have to be knocked down. Never once in the series did anyone have a moment of happiness which is not punished. Like, as soon as you get your exit money, BAM brain problems! Successfully convert a idle mainframe into a time share business, NOPE it will be stolen from you. I feel like they are conflating sadness with grit and unnecessarily concentrating only on the sad/difficult parts. As a counter example, look at breaking bad or better call saul. Breaking Bad is perhaps the most successful prestige show since Sopranos (I think it might be even more successful if only looked at commercially). But the show has fun with its universe. Even The Wire, which is a show about everything that can go wrong with the city has moment which feel human and are not sad/difficult.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm definitely not a fan of the ways they put them through the wringer- Gordon's health issues were a particular excessive twist of the knife. Interestingly enough, that description sort of describes Silicon Valley's trajectory for its protagonists as well. Could it just be that showrunners don't know what to do with their characters once they find success, especially in the potentially extremely lucrative world of tech? Amusingly enough, I remember this 2015 article comparing the two, as well as Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, when both shows were still on their early seasons: https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-halt-catch-fire-microserfs-douglas-coupland/ https://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/silicon-valley-ha...

Mountain_Skies 6y ago

As others have also mentioned, the biggest sin the show commits is having the main characters invent so much. It's certainly not unknown for a person or a group that innovate in multiple fields but for them to innovate in so many was a bit of a stretch but one that was acceptable for storytelling purposes. An alternate could have been to fade characters in and out over the seasons. Joe and Gordon are the stars of the PC-clone season, with Cameron and Donna playing supporting roles. In the Online Services season, Cameron and Donna step forward while Joe and Gordon become secondary characters and characters such as Yo-Yo and Tom increase their presence. Season three could have had Cameron and Donna fall back to secondary characters while Yo-Yo and Tom became the main characters in creating a what would essentially be something like Sierra Online or Electronic Arts. Each season could have introduced a new period of tech and introduced new minor characters that would be the center of the next season. For continuity, the common thread in all of the companies could have been Boz, moving from company to company in a sales and business development role. This way the show could have continued on though to present day and even taken a branch here and there during periods of higher than typical innovation. The big downside is that you end up rotating out some very talented actors. All of the main cast of the show as filmed were really good and it would have been a shame to lose that but the storytelling would have been better for it.

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itsoktocry 6y ago
Your approach might work for the tech-oriented audience members, but the character development and ongoing drama is what makes the show appealing to people who don't care about the tech. It's part of what makes the show brilliant.
prepend 6y ago
The way I look at it is that tech frequently has people inventing the same approach over and over. So this actually happens, just it’s not always the version that takes off. Sometimes I shrug when someone says “I invented Facebook in 1990.” But sometimes that happens, although people don’t normally talk about it in public. I’ve worked with co-workers who “invented” aspect oriented programming, Jenkins, ajax, nosql sui generis. A few years later in each case I remember thinking “oh yeah this is what John Doe” was building. So I just chalked this up to people in this company “inventing” mobile computers, dial-up communities, and portals at the same time as compaq, prodigy, and yahoo.

pkd 6y ago

Great work and I am glad this show is building a cult following. I consider the later 3 seasons of the show as the third best TV series I have seen in the past decade (behind only True Detective S1 and Chernobyl). If you have been struggling with the first season, consider sticking with it!

ekianjo 6y ago
Are the series technical or rather vague in that regard? If they are, how accurate are they?
- querulous 6y ago
  i found it very accurate technically if not historically. it doesn't really linger on the technical aspects though, it's very much just used as window dressing
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    I found it fairly believable, if not completely accurate, in both aspects. Most of the things in the show are things that actually happened in real life, just with the serial numbers filed off. For instance, Cardiff Electric is basically fake Compaq, Comet is basically fake Yahoo!, and Rover is like fake Google. There's even a reference to the Morris worm. Sure, fake Google comes a little early in the timeline, and Mutiny doesn't exactly map to anything that's familiar to me, but it all feels like it could have happened. Verisimilitude is really what matters here, and they pull it all off to an absolute T. On the technical aspects, I loved when Donna got to do her thing those couple of times and do data recovery on disks. I wish they had been able to give her a bigger role in the early part of the series, because her character really shines when allowed to. And, we have to mention the set design. It's perfect, right down to the little touches, like Donna and Gordon's J.C. Penney TV, or the Yars' Revenge poster hanging up in the Mutiny frat house. Sometimes I literally watch the show just to look at the sets.
    - Mountain_Skies 6y ago

dreamcompiler 6y ago

I've probably said this before, but I was a computer engineer in Texas in the 80s and this show captures that culture perfectly.* I first learned "Halt and Catch Fire" as an obscure illegal instruction on the 6800 processor that would lock it up. When I heard about this show my first reaction was "How dare they title a show with a meme from an obscure part of my hindbrain! Guess I can't use that for a password any more." *Well almost perfectly. I don't remember many engineers or coders being as attractive as the actors on this show.

jorvi 6y ago
> *Well almost perfectly. I don't remember many engineers or coders being as attractive as the actors on this show. This always amuses me about American-produced shows. Even the guy cast as 'background hobo #2' is a handsome person with token dirt and ragged clothes applied.
- scandox 6y ago
  This was always true for female actors, but up to about the late 1970s male actors - even leading ones - could have any kind of head on them ... Some wonderfully charismatic ugliness going on. I think the pendulum will swing back eventually. I hope.
- prepend 6y ago
  I worked for a startup and we had a programming intern in my shop who was a new mom who wanted to learn programming. She was also an ex model from Denmark or Belgium or somewhere. She was really pretty, prettier than the actors on Halt and Catch Fire, and got a ton of attention from the rest of the programmers who were almost all typical programmers. [0] She was doing well as a programmer when the company folded. Other than this one programmer, I’ve never seen any programmers or product managers or engineers as attractive as in this show. [0] “In a book called Computer Power and Human Reason, a professor of computer science at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum writes of a malady he calls “the compulsion to program.” He describes the afflicted as “bright young men of disheveled appearance, often with sunken, glowing eyes,” who play out “megalomaniacal fantasies of omnipotence” at computer consoles; they sit at their machines, he writes, “their arms tensed and waiting to fire their fingers, already poised to strike, at the buttons and keys on which their attention seems to be as riveted as a gambler’s on the rolling dice.” ― Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine -

minhaz23 6y ago

im happy this is getting more attention and a discussion now, i looked at it friday night and it had no discussion or upvotes just bad timing i guess but i was blown away by how well thought out and executed the authors work is, thank you for bringing it to others' attention. i hope they get some use out of it, i definitely got inspiration from it

danso 6y ago

Very nice. Built on Jekyll, apparently: https://github.com/ablwr/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus https://github.com/ablwr/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus

ablwr 6y ago
Ya! Although extreeeeeemely kludgy, I did so many hacky things -- definitely could not be used as a template for anything else and is a bit weird/embarrassing. I'll pretend it's an homage to the 90s web even though it's actually just laziness. ;) I initially started with GatsbyJS/React, but it was stopping me from getting to what I needed to do (CSS + content). So even though I was going to start with full JS, it ended up JS-free (I don't use any trackers), which also saved me from having to jump through the right hoops to be more accessibility-friendly!

hardwaresofton 6y ago

If you liked Halt and Catch Fire and the music therein, make sure to check out the soundtrack, it's available on bandcamp[0]. I listen to it when I want ~medium to high focus when working, and sometimes to get me "in the mood" so to speak. [0]: https://paulhaslinger.bandcamp.com/album/halt-and-catch-fire-original-television-series-soundtrack https://paulhaslinger.bandcamp.com/album/halt-and-catch-fire...

pmiller2 6y ago
Speaking of music, while this show has so many amazing things going for it, one of the best is the intro sequence and the theme music. That puts it on rare footing with shows like Mad Men and Covert Affairs. I know Netflix puts this button on everything, but I never use the "Skip Intro" button on these series.
- Foxboron 6y ago
  I had to look up the guy that actually designed it, and I realized they have pretty much made all the intro cinematics I adore from TV shows. Westworld, American Gods, Man in the High Castle and Halt and Catch Fire. https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/raoul-marks/ https://www.artofthetitle.com/designer/raoul-marks/ https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/halt-and-catch-fire/ https://www.artofthetitle.com/title/halt-and-catch-fire/
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Huh, really. I haven't gotten around to watching American Gods, and Westworld isn't my thing, but I also enjoyed the title sequence for The Man in the High Castle. It isn't one of the ones I'd watch every time, just because it's so chilling, but I do very much enjoy it. The show itself was incredible, of course, and also has a bit of a chilling feeling to it. It's a perfect fit.
    - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
      Nice thing about the title sequence for The Man in the High Castle is that it doubles as an prologue in setting the story. Much nicer than having to read (or have narrated) a background story to get things started.

vincent-manis 6y ago

The strange thing is that the “instruction” Halt and Catch Fire originated in a joke System/360 “green card” (reference summary) from the 1960s, along with Rewind and Break Tape, Execute (or Punch) Operator, and many others I've long since forgotten. Reference is sometimes made to an undocumented Motorola 6800 instruction, but the term is from the Big Iron era, and has nothing to do with personal computing. It's really from the "Blinkenlichts" era, when people commonly put up cartoons in the machine room showing a floating-point adder as a snake in a birdbath. By the way, Big Iron's abilities in the physical world were real. I occasionally operated a System/360 with 4 2311 disk drives, 7.5MB monsters with the form factor of washing machines. When running the IBM sort program, these clunkers were apt to move around the machine room.

newswasboring 6y ago
> when people commonly put up cartoons in the machine room showing a floating-point adder as a snake in a birdbath. I really want to see this, can't find it by googling though. Maybe you know where to find it?
- vincent-manis 6y ago
  The last time I saw that one was in the University of British Columbia 7044 machine room, circa 1969. It was part of an “Anatomy of a Computer” cartoon, with a number of other visual puns. The adder is the only one I remember. Have never seen it online, alas.
  - cmsefton 6y ago
    Interestingly, looking around for this cartoon led me to these two specimens showing adders in chip and circuit design: https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/fulladder.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/fulladder.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/halfadder.html https://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/creatures/pages/halfadder.html
rootbear 6y ago
Our CS department newsletter once had cartoons featuring snakes illustrating both adders and half-adders, the latter being the victim of an ax.

adamredwoods 6y ago

Back in the 80's my brother and I would type in programs from a computer magazine called "Compute's Gazette" which was mainly for the Commodore 64. I remember typing in a variant of code that was similar to assembly (they coined it MLX), and included checksums at the end of each line to make sure we typed it in correctly. We spent many hours typing it in and playing these "lite" games. https://kotaku.com/load-great-memories-8-1-5930961 https://kotaku.com/load-great-memories-8-1-5930961 https://archive.org/stream/1983-12-compute-magazine/Compute_Issue_043_1983_Dec#page/n215/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/1983-12-compute-magazine/Compute_... I have to admit I really miss the days of being able to type in a game from a book (meh.... not really).

prepend 6y ago
I remember doing this from Byte magazine, or at least I think I do. I didn’t have a hard drive so I would spend all day typing in the program, run it and lose it when the computer shut down. I remember being mad when my sibling would turn off the computer unexpectedly.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> typing in a variant of code that was similar to assembly And in case you didn't have a disk drive, the magazine included the BASIC source code listing of the program that you had to type _those_ programs into.

stevecalifornia 6y ago

I have watched all four seasons seven times. This show is so good I don't recommend it to my friends because I'm not sure I could handle it if they didn't like it as much as myself. If you haven't seen the show, watch season 1 episode 1. If you don't like it, this isn't your show. You don't have to invest 20 hours of your life 'to get to the good season'. It's all good right from the start.

yumraj 6y ago
I loved the first time I watched it. However, when I started watching it again, I could not - while I absolutely loved the show, it always left me a little sad for them.. I may have to try again..
- Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  Same here. I made it part of the way through season one a second time but lost my patience for most of the relationship drama. It was fine the first time through, so I don't think it was a poor choice to have it in the show, but it does reduce its rewatch value.
- psalminen 6y ago
  This is one of the few shows where I've hated every main character at different times throughout the series. I just started my second time through and I'm interest to see if I feel the same.
weaksauce 6y ago
yeah it really is one of my favorite shows out there. really great
pmiller2 6y ago
Non-spoiler alert: you might just have to grit your teeth and hang on through the first few seconds, where the armadillo gets run over.
- jonny383 6y ago

hnlmorg 6y ago

If you guys liked Halt and Catch Fire, I'd also like to recommend: - Pirates of Silicon Valley (this largely follows Gates and Jobs): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/ - Micro Men (this is about the British tech scene in the 80s): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n5b92 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1459467/

prepend 6y ago
Also Valley of the Boom [0] by National Geographic focusing on Netscape, Pixelon, and a couple others. And General Magic [1] - a documentary about the startup General Magic with interviews with early employees who went on to Apple, Google, etc And Silicon Cowboys [2] - documentary about Compaq in the early days, pretty much the real story version of Season 1 [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Boom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Boom [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/ [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/

__exit__ 6y ago

Really great set of resources! Bookmarked! Also a great companion to rewatch the series! BTW, does anynone know where I could buy the complete series on bluray or dvd? I loved watching the show on TV at its time, but cannot find all the seasons to buy and rewatch.

jhbadger 6y ago

While there were interesting things about the show, like how Joe manipulated Gordon and others much like many stories of how Steve Jobs acted, there were just so many inaccuracies that annoyed the hell out of me. For example, the C64s were shown to have C:> prompts like DOS machines, probably because the set designers thought that all "old" computers worked that way and were too young to actually know the era.

ido 6y ago
My favorite is at some point in the last season they show a 286 booting up with more than 16mb RAM (the real world maximum that CPU supports). I can't help but think this is an intentional easter egg.

dusted 6y ago

Loved the show, and this website looks awesome and seems to contain a massive wealth of information on computing history, bookmarked! Probably my only beef with this show is when he dumps the rom using switches and LEDs, sure you could do that, but you could also be reasonable, and hook it up to a computer and write a lil program to dump it, when you're that smart anyway..

larrydag 6y ago

One of the most underrated shows in the last decade. This show isn't supposed to be a narrative history of a computer company. This show is to encompass the vigor, innovation, power struggle, paradigm shift of the 80's and 90's of the computing revolution. I was just a kid when all of this began and grew up during this era. This show does a great job of showing the excitement during that time. Everyone knew back at that time something was brewing with technology and it seemed there was something new and exciting every month. It was also a battle for supremacy to see who was going to lead the revolution. A very fascinating part of tech history.

prepend 6y ago

There’s a quote [0] by Lee Pace in the last season that I remember as both the best description of the Internet as well as explains my love in the mid 90s when I first started using the web... “ When I was five, my mother took me to the city. And we went through the Holland Tunnel, and it was basic. Concrete and steel. But it was also my excitement sitting in the backseat, wondering when it was going to be our turn to emerge. It was the explosion of sunlight. And when we exited the tunnel, all of Manhattan was laid out before us. And that was the best part of the trip the amazing possibility to be able to go anywhere within something that is magnificent and never-ending. This is the first Web browser,” I love this show so much. I worked for a bunch of misses and I like seeing a description of the times that were so important, but not told by the winners. [0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5707526/characters/nm1195855 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5707526/characters/nm1195855

racl101 6y ago

The show started off great in the first season but then it became harder to believe as it went on that a rag tag group of people were at the almost at the forefront of all these technological revolutions in computers. I get that it's fiction but still .... you gotta keep it somewhat believable. It would've been better if, much like Forrest Gump, all these revolutions happened in the background but they weren't necessarily at the forefront of them.

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

resubmit from days ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25873949

ChrisArchitect 6y ago

This is well done for sure, and I love HACF but already watched live and rewatched so not going to go back, but it's nice to connect alot of the materials and background that came up while we were all watching the show

spamizbad 6y ago

I absolutely love this "vintage" web design. The author's page[1] is very impressive and I love the atheistic. Wish more creative people in the industry would take design risks like this. [1] https://ashleyblewer.com/ https://ashleyblewer.com/

mprime1 6y ago
Then I recommend checking out the Indie web webring https://indieweb.org/webring https://indieweb.org/webring
ablwr 6y ago
thank you so much!! CSS is so good these days, thanks to the dedicated and hard work of standards authors. I recommend that anyone who has been driven into a blind rage trying to do something simple like center divs give CSS another shot now that we have CSS Grid.

vages 6y ago

I can't seem to stream this in my country, and the entire series is not available on physical media. Ten years ago, I would have been able to buy this show on physical media from abroad. Now, if no streaming provider purchased the television show rights, I can't get it. And there's not enough purchasing power to produce a physical version of it. Isn't this globalization in reverse? For the record: I live in Norway. Please let me know if there is any way to see the series.

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Mountain_Skies 6y ago
Looks like only the first two seasons have been published on physical media so you're stuck with less than legal methods of watching it.

anonymousiam 6y ago

Because nobody has yet mentioned anything related to the title for this series, here's the explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...

bishnu 6y ago

If you enjoy this series I really recommend reading The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder. It's 40 years old but still the best book I have ever read about what motivates engineers (not entrepeneurs - there are tons of books about that - but rank-and-file engineers). Actually, the first season of H&CF cribs a lot from the book (from the overall plot to a few very specific anecdotes).

nwsm 6y ago

I liked the first season a lot but got kind of annoyed when they started just having the main characters invent basically everything from tech history. That being said, I had a good time watching with my mom who is also in technology, and getting her insights on the references and depiction of 80s tech. She thought it was/is very well done.

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dualboot 6y ago

That this show never had a single Emmy nomination is an absolute crime. The ensemble cast was phenomenal. They delivered believable, vulnerable, and often completely frustrating performances. I'm a sucker for period character-driven drama and there are few shows that do it as well as HACF did. I was drawn in by Lee Pace and my extreme nostalgia for the early days of PC computing. I stayed because I fell in love with the characters. You can pick apart the technical side of it all day(jwz did) but you would entirely be missing the point, at least in my opinion. https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/11/if-only-i-knew-it-was-so-simple/ https://www.jwz.org/blog/2016/11/if-only-i-knew-it-was-so-si...