4 ms·

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

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.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    By “capability for federation,” do you mean something more than what FidoNet allowed?
    - vidarh 6y ago
      Ability to establish a live packet network. Yes, it was basically re-inventing IP for no good reason because lack of internet access meant lack of info about what already existed... When I, a few years later, got an internet connection and started reading the relevant ISPs, it was pretty annoying to see what had already existed.
      - pmiller2 6y ago
        Interesting. So, basically, it sounds like you had some dial-out modems hooked up, and some kind of database of other BBS numbers, kind of like a routing table, except you basically offloaded the actual routing to the phone company? Then, you could call out to the other BBS and switch the user's display to show the external BBS rather than yours? If so, that's an interesting idea, but it kind of sounds like a good way for your users to run your phone bill up rather than theirs, while possibly not even engaging with your BBS at all. (For those who aren't familiar, back in the BBS days, you had to actually pay for "long distance" phone calls. And, "long distance" often wasn't very far away.) Do I have it right, or was it something different?
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Sure, it's kind of absurd that the same 4 people would be at the center of so many technological shifts, over a period of 20+ years. But, you really have to accept that as a conceit of the medium. There are basically only two ways to construct a TV series that has any continuity to it whatsoever. You can either keep most of the main characters together for the entire series, and watch them grow and change, like most series do; or, you can do like American Horror Story does and just scrap everything and start anew every season or so. Some series don't care about continuity, like Seinfeld, so they fall outside the scope of this statement, but, the majority of TV series will be one or the other of these. And, there's nothing really wrong with this construction, either. Like I said, it's just something you have to accept, kind of like how every TV home or apartment is absolutely massive compared to what real people live in, or how people are able to comfortably fly on airplanes without squishing themselves into the seats or their heads being within inches or less of the roof of the cabin. Or the fact that if anybody coughs on TV, they're usually deathly ill. I'll have to check out Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, though. I've been putting off watching it for some reason -- maybe because for most of 2020, I felt like I was living in a Black Mirror episode. Speaking of Netflix series that really get the time period correct, Stranger Things is 100% exactly like what it was like to be a kid in the 80s. Starting from the bowl haircut on Will, right on down to every last detail of the mall from season 3, and battling the Demogorgon in a friend's basement. Absolute 10/10 set design, and I never noticed a single anachronism.

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.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  By “capability for federation,” do you mean something more than what FidoNet allowed?
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Ability to establish a live packet network. Yes, it was basically re-inventing IP for no good reason because lack of internet access meant lack of info about what already existed... When I, a few years later, got an internet connection and started reading the relevant ISPs, it was pretty annoying to see what had already existed.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Interesting. So, basically, it sounds like you had some dial-out modems hooked up, and some kind of database of other BBS numbers, kind of like a routing table, except you basically offloaded the actual routing to the phone company? Then, you could call out to the other BBS and switch the user's display to show the external BBS rather than yours? If so, that's an interesting idea, but it kind of sounds like a good way for your users to run your phone bill up rather than theirs, while possibly not even engaging with your BBS at all. (For those who aren't familiar, back in the BBS days, you had to actually pay for "long distance" phone calls. And, "long distance" often wasn't very far away.) Do I have it right, or was it something different?
pmiller2 6y ago
Sure, it's kind of absurd that the same 4 people would be at the center of so many technological shifts, over a period of 20+ years. But, you really have to accept that as a conceit of the medium. There are basically only two ways to construct a TV series that has any continuity to it whatsoever. You can either keep most of the main characters together for the entire series, and watch them grow and change, like most series do; or, you can do like American Horror Story does and just scrap everything and start anew every season or so. Some series don't care about continuity, like Seinfeld, so they fall outside the scope of this statement, but, the majority of TV series will be one or the other of these. And, there's nothing really wrong with this construction, either. Like I said, it's just something you have to accept, kind of like how every TV home or apartment is absolutely massive compared to what real people live in, or how people are able to comfortably fly on airplanes without squishing themselves into the seats or their heads being within inches or less of the roof of the cabin. Or the fact that if anybody coughs on TV, they're usually deathly ill. I'll have to check out Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, though. I've been putting off watching it for some reason -- maybe because for most of 2020, I felt like I was living in a Black Mirror episode. Speaking of Netflix series that really get the time period correct, Stranger Things is 100% exactly like what it was like to be a kid in the 80s. Starting from the bowl haircut on Will, right on down to every last detail of the mall from season 3, and battling the Demogorgon in a friend's basement. Absolute 10/10 set design, and I never noticed a single anachronism.