5 ms·

As someone who lived through that era, I couldn't watch it. A deep sense of uncanny valley. The 97% that they got completely right was ruined by the 3% that tha

As someone who lived through that era, I couldn't watch it. A deep sense of uncanny valley. The 97% that they got completely right was ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Often senslessly so. Stuff that a technical consultant would have caught in an instant. I did rather enjoy the way that they captured the manic energy of the generation of dirtbag sales and marketing people that drove the PC industry in that era. What it missed, I though, is that it failed to capture the breathless sense of wonder at finding yourself at the center of an event around which the entire universe was going to pivot -- something that was obviously going to change everything. That's what you lived if you worked on the technical side of the PC industry. Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine, however....

walterbell 8mo ago
Carl Ledbetter (one of three technical advisors) interview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719
- rerdavies 8mo ago
  Ledbetter actually implicitly reveals why the pilot episode was so off, interestingly. First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before the first regular season script was written. There's only so much a technical consultant can do when he's presented with a script whose central plot point is "it's hard to reverse engineer IBM PCs". He does claim responsibility for the procedure they used to reverse engineer the BIOS, oddly. But I am inclined to be generous, and give him credit for providing the most absurdly difficult technically-plausible procedure for reverse-engineering the BIOS, and grant that the right thing to do (throw the entire script away and start again because it WASN'T difficult to reverse-engineer the BIOS) was not a pragmatic realistic recommendation for a rookie technical consultant to deliver. To put things in perspective. There was no need to reverse engineer the BIOS at all, because the IBM Technical Manual provided exquisitely commented assembler source code for the BIOS (copyright protected), including API documentation (the essence of which is not copyright protected). And a complete set of schematics. And IBM was -- for complicated reasons -- actively encouraging third parties to build clones. So correcting the technical inaccuracies in a pilot script whose entire plot revolves around "how audaciously difficult it is to reverse an IBM PC" is a bit interesting. Once corrected, the plot of the pilot episode would have revolved around clean-room procedures for translating API documentation into copyright-safe BIOSes. Probably not that interesting to the unwashed masses. And abstract speculation as to whether IBM would sue their pants off for IP violations, even though IBM was very publicly and loudly saying that they would not. And whether you could convince CFOs and investors that they could take IBM at their word. The actual strategy IBM was using was pretty clever, and quite horrifyingly machiavellian (although fair and reasonable enough that nobody ever really complained about it). I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to tell the story of what happened when IBM patent attorneys showed up at our door wanting to have a discussion about a 10" thick stack of patents. Suffice it to say that I think they were playing a long game.
  - walterbell 8mo ago
    IBM would later work with Apache Foundation for patent-aware open source. They also helped to legitimize Linux for corporate use.
shinycode 8mo ago
It’s very hard to capture everything in such an era. Maybe they made other choices that aligned with the fiction they were writing. It’s not a documentary. And TV shows can’t capture as much as books. The show successfully gives enough to people to haven’t lived in that era. It’s an amazing show.
- Nevermark 8mo ago
  I view any historically based show as an alternate history. Nothing good comes from expecting too much consistency with our reality. After all, if we could rewind those years, all that chaos would have all happened very differently. We canonize our own particular history too easily. Manifest destiny is not a real thing.
- latexr 8mo ago
  Exactly. Chernobyl is an amazing show too, even if Ulana Khomyuk is a composite character instead of a real historical person.
snapetom 8mo ago
I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak. I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.
- vidarh 8mo ago
  I've only visited Palo Alto, but I recognised way too many aspects of that series from various VC startups. Up to and including the startup I was apart of that had offices in a bedroom in a house in Atherton for a while, and the craziness around Techcrunch (which was incidentally started out of the bedroom next to "ours" in that house in Atherton).
  - snapetom 8mo ago
    There is a scene in the first season where they're all on a bus and Gilfoyle sees a middle aged woman on a bike waiting for a light. The soliloquy was so random and not even funny, but fit so well. That woman was basically every middle aged woman neighbor of mine.
- clydethefrog 8mo ago
  I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]: >“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ >Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.” [0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...
haspok 8mo ago
> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!
- stevenwoo 8mo ago
  I lived through parts of the tech eras depicted and I thought it captured the culture of people really well. It would have been boring to get bogged down in the details of historical differences, I'm not expecting this to be a documentary. Many of the people I worked with referred to the mushroom farms referenced in Soul of a New Machine from first hand experience The show had to change things as the years passed on the show in order to have the same main cast of characters involved as technology changed. I read Soul of a New Machine recently and one really has to have the right mind set to appreciate it, there are a lot of very specific details to that time in Massachusetts, working for what feels like a small division of ponderous Data General, competing technically and politically with separate groups within Data General, where every main character is a man, almost incidentally competing with the other computer companies, it does convey the feeling of a startup within a bigger company, so I don't hold the book in nearly the same high regard as others.
- canucker2016 8mo ago
  Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents. So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip. Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper. After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS. After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend. But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console... Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind. For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed. You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does). The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing. One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS. But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode. see https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-and-catch-fire-bios-cloning-scene-unrealistic https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-...
postexitus 8mo ago
It is fiction. Not meant to be a documentary. You have liberties as an artist to tell a compelling story - and boy did they do it.

walterbell 8mo ago

Carl Ledbetter (one of three technical advisors) interview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719

rerdavies 8mo ago
Ledbetter actually implicitly reveals why the pilot episode was so off, interestingly. First off, he wasn't working in the industry at the time the pilot episode takes place. He first got involved in the industry a couple of years later, working for Sun Microsystems. (So not quite the ideal candidate for a technical consultant). And second off, he came to the table after the pilot episode had been written, but before the first regular season script was written. There's only so much a technical consultant can do when he's presented with a script whose central plot point is "it's hard to reverse engineer IBM PCs". He does claim responsibility for the procedure they used to reverse engineer the BIOS, oddly. But I am inclined to be generous, and give him credit for providing the most absurdly difficult technically-plausible procedure for reverse-engineering the BIOS, and grant that the right thing to do (throw the entire script away and start again because it WASN'T difficult to reverse-engineer the BIOS) was not a pragmatic realistic recommendation for a rookie technical consultant to deliver. To put things in perspective. There was no need to reverse engineer the BIOS at all, because the IBM Technical Manual provided exquisitely commented assembler source code for the BIOS (copyright protected), including API documentation (the essence of which is not copyright protected). And a complete set of schematics. And IBM was -- for complicated reasons -- actively encouraging third parties to build clones. So correcting the technical inaccuracies in a pilot script whose entire plot revolves around "how audaciously difficult it is to reverse an IBM PC" is a bit interesting. Once corrected, the plot of the pilot episode would have revolved around clean-room procedures for translating API documentation into copyright-safe BIOSes. Probably not that interesting to the unwashed masses. And abstract speculation as to whether IBM would sue their pants off for IP violations, even though IBM was very publicly and loudly saying that they would not. And whether you could convince CFOs and investors that they could take IBM at their word. The actual strategy IBM was using was pretty clever, and quite horrifyingly machiavellian (although fair and reasonable enough that nobody ever really complained about it). I'm not actually sure if I'm allowed to tell the story of what happened when IBM patent attorneys showed up at our door wanting to have a discussion about a 10" thick stack of patents. Suffice it to say that I think they were playing a long game.
- walterbell 8mo ago
  IBM would later work with Apache Foundation for patent-aware open source. They also helped to legitimize Linux for corporate use.

shinycode 8mo ago

It’s very hard to capture everything in such an era. Maybe they made other choices that aligned with the fiction they were writing. It’s not a documentary. And TV shows can’t capture as much as books. The show successfully gives enough to people to haven’t lived in that era. It’s an amazing show.

Nevermark 8mo ago
I view any historically based show as an alternate history. Nothing good comes from expecting too much consistency with our reality. After all, if we could rewind those years, all that chaos would have all happened very differently. We canonize our own particular history too easily. Manifest destiny is not a real thing.
latexr 8mo ago
Exactly. Chernobyl is an amazing show too, even if Ulana Khomyuk is a composite character instead of a real historical person.

snapetom 8mo ago

I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak. I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.

vidarh 8mo ago
I've only visited Palo Alto, but I recognised way too many aspects of that series from various VC startups. Up to and including the startup I was apart of that had offices in a bedroom in a house in Atherton for a while, and the craziness around Techcrunch (which was incidentally started out of the bedroom next to "ours" in that house in Atherton).
- snapetom 8mo ago
  There is a scene in the first season where they're all on a bus and Gilfoyle sees a middle aged woman on a bike waiting for a light. The soliloquy was so random and not even funny, but fit so well. That woman was basically every middle aged woman neighbor of mine.
clydethefrog 8mo ago
I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]: >“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’ >Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.” [0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-valley-nails-silicon-valley https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...

haspok 8mo ago

> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!

stevenwoo 8mo ago
I lived through parts of the tech eras depicted and I thought it captured the culture of people really well. It would have been boring to get bogged down in the details of historical differences, I'm not expecting this to be a documentary. Many of the people I worked with referred to the mushroom farms referenced in Soul of a New Machine from first hand experience The show had to change things as the years passed on the show in order to have the same main cast of characters involved as technology changed. I read Soul of a New Machine recently and one really has to have the right mind set to appreciate it, there are a lot of very specific details to that time in Massachusetts, working for what feels like a small division of ponderous Data General, competing technically and politically with separate groups within Data General, where every main character is a man, almost incidentally competing with the other computer companies, it does convey the feeling of a startup within a bigger company, so I don't hold the book in nearly the same high regard as others.
canucker2016 8mo ago
Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents. So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip. Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an 8KB EPROM chip if you do a web search) and plugs it into a breadboard and proceeds to dump out each byte of the chip with Joe (Lee Pace) writing down the address and data at that particular address on a pad of paper. After writing the address and address contents for the first time, Joe asks Gordon how many times they have to do this procedure. Gordon replies 65536, which would imply a 64KB ROM chip - but the web search said the IBM PC used an 8KB EPROM for the BIOS. After more dreary, repetitive work, they accomplish the dumping and transcribing of the IBM PC BIOS in one weekend. But one could have used a short BASIC program to dump the IBM PC BIOS ROM - the IBM PC wasn't a locked down game console... Maybe as a HW guy, writing a BASIC program to dump the BIOS would not come to mind. For a legal clean-room implementation of the IBM PC BIOS, the actual contents of the IBM PC BIOS aren't needed. You need the specs for each BIOS function (input/output parameters and description of what the BIOS function does). The IBM PC Technical Reference Manual (which cost $99 back then) contains the BIOS assembly language listing. One would need to type up the lines that list the input/output requirements for each BIOS function and their purpose and they'd be half-way to a clean-room PC BIOS. But that'd be way less dramatic (and easier) than the way shown in the episode. see https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-and-catch-fire-bios-cloning-scene-unrealistic https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/112846/halt-...

postexitus 8mo ago

It is fiction. Not meant to be a documentary. You have liberties as an artist to tell a compelling story - and boy did they do it.