5 ms·

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

by 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
      Mutiny felt to me like it was PlayNet or Quantum Link, the company that eventually became AOL.
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      It is a bit hilarious that the main characters, often Cameron, end up inventing much of modern computing. Mutiny is not only an on-line game network, but includes a graphical chat room (proto-social networking), a Craigslist feature, and a BBS. But I do appreciate it for the sake of the show exploring as many of the aspects of those eras of early computing as possible. Even Joe's "working for an oil company" plotline in season 2 reminded me of the time Exxon got into computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842547 As far as getting the window-dressing and feel of the time right, there's also Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
      - fallous 6y ago
        Those aren't anachronisms, they actually existed in the 80s and 90s on private online networks. Real-time chat? Compuserve's CB Simulator. Craigslist? Compuserve certainly had classified ads as I'm sure did most of the others, including BIX. Usenet/Bullet Boards for interest groups? Compuserve Interest Groups, and every other service had that as well. Online gaming was also available on most of the networks, but special shout-out to Air Warrior that ran on GEnie. You could also purchase airline reservations via SABRE which was supported by Compuserve and GEnie, get news, stock quotes, etc. And yes, most of those services started out buying timeshare cycles from the likes of oil, insurance, and banking companies during evenings and weekends.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        BBS networks often had on-line games, that often served as "proto-social networking". Most of them certainly had forums to buy and sell. Many had clients with graphical capabilities. They didn't exaggerate much there - it was a space with plenty of competition, to the point that for a lot of people the Internet seemed like a boring step down in capabilities for some time, with networks like AOL and Prodigy believing they could stem the tide and keep people walled in. For my part, before I got internet access, I reinvented a bunch of that stuff myself, and worked on a graphical BBS client and capability for federation. And there's nothing unique in that - I know many others who also did, unaware of what existed, and without thinking we invented anything new, because they were small, incremental obvious steps from what we did know about. It's simply a natural set of things that people wanted, and the limiting factor was not the ideas, but access to time, talent and capital and a willingness to go ahead and do it. That's often how these things work. Things get independently reinvented all over the place. Not necessarily well, or fast enough etc. And you'll note Cameron is not the only one to invent any of the things she does in the series either.
- Sylamore 6y ago
  Things happen around the technologies of the era, but the technologies are not the center of the show by any means.
- Ataraxy 6y ago
  It's a character study more like Mad Men meets Forest Gump in the silicon valley nascent tech startup era. Personally I think it's better than Mad Men.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >Mad Men meets Forest Gump This is a great description. >silicon valley nascent tech startup era Even better is that they start in Texas, and going to the up-and-coming Silicon Valley is one of the story lines.
    - at-fates-hands 6y ago
      > Even better is that they start in Texas Which at the time was referred to as the "Silicon Prairie". I still remember my Dad working for Control Data and he travelled frequently back and forth between Minnesota and Texas. I also remember a lot of conversations my parents had first about moving to Texas and then later moving out to CA when SV really took off. We never moved, but during those years when tech really took off, he was constantly being recruited by companies in the valley.
- RoyTyrell 6y ago
  For TV/film, it's probably one of the most accurate that I've seen. There are some things that are obviously for drama and visual effect though. Some examples (very low spoilers but you've been warned): ------------------------------ ------------------------------ 1. In one of the first episodes, a couple characters design up a circuit to step through the values of an EEPROM to read off the value of each address. They use a series of 8 LEDs and convert the binary value to decimal in their head and then write it down on paper. Even if you were going to do something very manual like that you would want to use a 7-segment LED and driver so you could at least just write down the hex value. 2. One of the characters writes some firmware in assembler, and other characters keep saying that their code is "beautiful" and "art". 3. Later on in the series, some of the characters run an online game company and run a distributed game server on networked IBM XTs. They don't actually say if they're using some custom OS or how the accomplished that, but that also isn't the point of those episodes either. 4. There are brief flashes of assembler, basic, and C on a computer screen and most of it seems to be at least slightly incorrect. All of that being said, I would give it a B+ for technical accuracy - and an A for being an awesome show.
barbecue_sauce 6y ago
I thought Season 1 was the best season.
- adventured 6y ago
  Season one was dramatically better than the last three seasons, all of which were filled with puffery and style over substance. Cameron - core to the show - got more distant, vague and poorly constructed with each season. The first season was gritty, tense, down to the metal. The rest of the seasons were good, not great, and weakened as each season went by. The last season was nearly mailed-in as far as story goes. It's like the writers were zooming out season by season and by the last season everything was distant, like watching cardboard cutouts of the characters from a great distance.
  - afterburner 6y ago
    I agree, I felt like the first season was the most evocative of a different time, the early 80s office tech environment. The second season felt like it had a more soap opera to it, so I stopped at the end of it. I got the sense from descriptions of the later seasons that this got worse. Found it odd the consensus where I looked was that the last two were the best and the 1st to be "tolerated".
    - Apocryphon 6y ago
      Season 2 had the best startup portrayal. House full of hackers and game fanatics. Fantastic energy. I even bought a shirt with the Mutiny logo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4
      - afterburner 6y ago
        I remember now I actually watched a bit of Season 3 and then quit, it wasn't Season 2 that made me quit per se. I did like Season 2 for its portrayal of BBSs, since I never did get in on that.
    - 6y ago

by pkd 6y ago

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
    Mutiny felt to me like it was PlayNet or Quantum Link, the company that eventually became AOL.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    It is a bit hilarious that the main characters, often Cameron, end up inventing much of modern computing. Mutiny is not only an on-line game network, but includes a graphical chat room (proto-social networking), a Craigslist feature, and a BBS. But I do appreciate it for the sake of the show exploring as many of the aspects of those eras of early computing as possible. Even Joe's "working for an oil company" plotline in season 2 reminded me of the time Exxon got into computing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842547 As far as getting the window-dressing and feel of the time right, there's also Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
    - fallous 6y ago
      Those aren't anachronisms, they actually existed in the 80s and 90s on private online networks. Real-time chat? Compuserve's CB Simulator. Craigslist? Compuserve certainly had classified ads as I'm sure did most of the others, including BIX. Usenet/Bullet Boards for interest groups? Compuserve Interest Groups, and every other service had that as well. Online gaming was also available on most of the networks, but special shout-out to Air Warrior that ran on GEnie. You could also purchase airline reservations via SABRE which was supported by Compuserve and GEnie, get news, stock quotes, etc. And yes, most of those services started out buying timeshare cycles from the likes of oil, insurance, and banking companies during evenings and weekends.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      BBS networks often had on-line games, that often served as "proto-social networking". Most of them certainly had forums to buy and sell. Many had clients with graphical capabilities. They didn't exaggerate much there - it was a space with plenty of competition, to the point that for a lot of people the Internet seemed like a boring step down in capabilities for some time, with networks like AOL and Prodigy believing they could stem the tide and keep people walled in. For my part, before I got internet access, I reinvented a bunch of that stuff myself, and worked on a graphical BBS client and capability for federation. And there's nothing unique in that - I know many others who also did, unaware of what existed, and without thinking we invented anything new, because they were small, incremental obvious steps from what we did know about. It's simply a natural set of things that people wanted, and the limiting factor was not the ideas, but access to time, talent and capital and a willingness to go ahead and do it. That's often how these things work. Things get independently reinvented all over the place. Not necessarily well, or fast enough etc. And you'll note Cameron is not the only one to invent any of the things she does in the series either.
Sylamore 6y ago
Things happen around the technologies of the era, but the technologies are not the center of the show by any means.
Ataraxy 6y ago
It's a character study more like Mad Men meets Forest Gump in the silicon valley nascent tech startup era. Personally I think it's better than Mad Men.
- itsoktocry 6y ago
  >Mad Men meets Forest Gump This is a great description. >silicon valley nascent tech startup era Even better is that they start in Texas, and going to the up-and-coming Silicon Valley is one of the story lines.
  - at-fates-hands 6y ago
    > Even better is that they start in Texas Which at the time was referred to as the "Silicon Prairie". I still remember my Dad working for Control Data and he travelled frequently back and forth between Minnesota and Texas. I also remember a lot of conversations my parents had first about moving to Texas and then later moving out to CA when SV really took off. We never moved, but during those years when tech really took off, he was constantly being recruited by companies in the valley.
RoyTyrell 6y ago
For TV/film, it's probably one of the most accurate that I've seen. There are some things that are obviously for drama and visual effect though. Some examples (very low spoilers but you've been warned): ------------------------------ ------------------------------ 1. In one of the first episodes, a couple characters design up a circuit to step through the values of an EEPROM to read off the value of each address. They use a series of 8 LEDs and convert the binary value to decimal in their head and then write it down on paper. Even if you were going to do something very manual like that you would want to use a 7-segment LED and driver so you could at least just write down the hex value. 2. One of the characters writes some firmware in assembler, and other characters keep saying that their code is "beautiful" and "art". 3. Later on in the series, some of the characters run an online game company and run a distributed game server on networked IBM XTs. They don't actually say if they're using some custom OS or how the accomplished that, but that also isn't the point of those episodes either. 4. There are brief flashes of assembler, basic, and C on a computer screen and most of it seems to be at least slightly incorrect. All of that being said, I would give it a B+ for technical accuracy - and an A for being an awesome show.

barbecue_sauce 6y ago

I thought Season 1 was the best season.

adventured 6y ago
Season one was dramatically better than the last three seasons, all of which were filled with puffery and style over substance. Cameron - core to the show - got more distant, vague and poorly constructed with each season. The first season was gritty, tense, down to the metal. The rest of the seasons were good, not great, and weakened as each season went by. The last season was nearly mailed-in as far as story goes. It's like the writers were zooming out season by season and by the last season everything was distant, like watching cardboard cutouts of the characters from a great distance.
- afterburner 6y ago
  I agree, I felt like the first season was the most evocative of a different time, the early 80s office tech environment. The second season felt like it had a more soap opera to it, so I stopped at the end of it. I got the sense from descriptions of the later seasons that this got worse. Found it odd the consensus where I looked was that the last two were the best and the 1st to be "tolerated".
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    Season 2 had the best startup portrayal. House full of hackers and game fanatics. Fantastic energy. I even bought a shirt with the Mutiny logo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJN2JN3_N_4
    - afterburner 6y ago
      I remember now I actually watched a bit of Season 3 and then quit, it wasn't Season 2 that made me quit per se. I did like Season 2 for its portrayal of BBSs, since I never did get in on that.
  - 6y ago