5 ms·
Halt and Catch Fire
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- thisisauserid 5mo agoThis article is deadbeef on arrival.
- burnte 5mo agoIt was a fun show. I really enjoyed it, a fictional run through the 80s and 90s computing industries.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoIt really starts strong too. The first couple of episodes are fantastic.
- jrmg 5mo agoHuh. I haven’t rewatched the show, but when I saw it originally - admittedly shortly after watching Mad Men - I thought “this is trying to be Mad Men, but it’s the '80s and in the computer industry” and interpreted Lee Pace as a laundered Don Draper. The show is much more, and much better, than that though. I’m glad I kept watching.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoThat’s how I pitch it to people because it gets them to watch it, but it is definitely distinct from it. Same energy though
- tptacek 5mo agoSame showrunner is doing the current season of The Terror (a/k/a "North Pole Bear Show" in my review notes; that first season was excellent).
- vpribish 5mo agothe terror was excellent! glad it's continuing
- TacticalCoder 5mo agoSame. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas and then computing moving to California. It both shows mainframe, personal computers (the C64) and then beige PC taking over. Great intro too: https://youtu.be/yD_kCKiSkoI https://youtu.be/yD_kCKiSkoI
- 0xCMP 5mo agoOh I'd never connected this. It makes so much sense. I'd always wondered what Texas had to do with computing that made so many things start there.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- throw0101a 5mo ago> Same. It shows the link between big oil and companies in Texas […] E.g., > Texas Instruments was founded by Cecil H. Green, J. Erik Jonsson, Eugene McDermott, and Patrick E. Haggerty in 1951. McDermott was one of the original founders of Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI) in 1930. McDermott, Green, and Jonsson were GSI employees who purchased the company in 1941. In November 1945, Patrick Haggerty was hired as general manager of the Laboratory and Manufacturing (L&M) division, which focused on electronic equipment.[14] By 1951, the L&M division, with its defense contracts, was growing faster than GSI's geophysical division. The company was reorganized and initially renamed General Instruments Inc. Because a firm named General Instrument already existed, the company was renamed Texas Instruments that same year. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Instruments And how it got in contact with military contracts: > TI entered the defense electronics market in 1942 with submarine detection equipment,[41] based on the seismic exploration technology previously developed for the oil industry. The division responsible for these products was known at different times as the Laboratory & Manufacturing Division, the Apparatus Division, the Equipment Group, and the Defense Systems & Electronics Group (DSEG). * Ibid
- 0xCMP 5mo agoIt's a shame that it is such a niche show in practice. The acting of Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis in particular are so good across all 4 seasons. I recommend it at every chance I get, but few people ever watch it. They're more likely to give Silicon Valley a try.
- riddley 5mo agoAll four leads are flawless and I can't really think of a single bad performance.
- whateveracct 5mo agoSilicon Valley is also pretty good. I went in expecting not to like it (in a Big Bang Theory "about nerds but not for them" way) but came out loving it. It may read as parody to some but it barely is. It's a comedic but accurate take on west coast tech industry of the 2010s
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- intothemild 5mo agoThe best part of Silicon Valley was that it had a very south park quality to it.. in that things that were actually happening at the time were parodied on the show.
- intothemild 5mo agoSame. Having experienced the growth of computing in those eras, the show itself had a very well researched yet very nostalgic sense of "oh yes. I'd forgotten about that".
- Unai 5mo agoLee Pace is just bigger than life, and Mackenzie Davis is electric in every scene, but my favourite on the show was Scoot McNairy's character. A very specific type of nerd that's rarely written with such depth and nuance. Although I guess that could be said of all the main (and not so main) characters in the show. If anyone else loved these actors watching HACF, I would recommend watching The Fall (Pace), Fargo S3 (McNairy) and Station Eleven (Davis).
- timenotwasted 5mo agoYeah a truly fantastic show all the way through the end. One of my favorites by far.
- mchinen 5mo agoIt's special for sure. For those on the fence, it has some writing and direction flaws, especially with minor characters, like the disgruntled neighbor and IP theft bit in the first season. But it grows as a show over time, and the 5 leads (including Toby Huss) smooth the problems out with their talent and chemistry. They really captured the urge to build things in tech, and the problems that come with it. HACF, Silicon Valley, and The Soul of a New Machine are a trifecta.
- pico303 5mo agoDon’t forget Fire in the Valley.
- mandw 5mo agoI have to admit, when a specific person died I was feeling so bad about it I never watched the last episode. I still have it on the drive how many years later.
- GranPC 5mo agoYou should probs edit out the spoiler, or encode it somehow for others who haven't watched it yet!
- mistic92 5mo agoI still have it downloaded somewhere as wanted to watch it again. It was great
- _heimdall 5mo agoAgreed. This was one of the few shows that advanced the storyline quite a bit threw the seasons without jumping the shark.
- sph 5mo agoI don't get why it's so praised. Everybody says it's about the rise of computing, and all I got was a shoehorned romance story with computers in the background. Just like all those sci-fi shows where the sci-fi is only a background to family drama.
- rigonkulous 5mo agoI lived that era and personally had many of the experiences of the characters over the decades, so as I watched, I compared the show to my own experiences. So for me the love/romance aspect was just the network television layer I had to peer through, in order to find the marrow of the meal, so to speak. That said, it did have a fast attack, a moderate decay, but then a fast release, in terms of 'interest envelope', for me personally. I enjoyed the good bits while they lasted, and tolerated the soap opera in case there were dregs, all the way to the end...
- brookst 5mo agoAll good stories are about the characters. Genre-first gets old quick.
- cman1444 5mo agoThis is why a lot of my favorite shows/movie series are ones only a few episodes long, but which really give a good feel for the world they take place in. Bladerunner and HBO's Chernobyl are two of my favorites that fit this.
- burnte 5mo agoEven companies that create computers are still run by people, and the relationships of those people are just as impactful as the business decisions.
- protocolture 5mo agoI mean, for something you consider to be the background, it takes up a hell of a lot of the foreground. And the romance was more character drama about people making extremely irresponsible choices.
- scar 5mo agoThere's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me. They introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time. I mean, wtf. World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before. That scene nearly made me quit the show right there and then. Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.
- ianbicking 5mo agoWhen I was a kid in the 80s I noticed a lot of hackers of that era that typed like that. I thought it was strange at the time, but not at all uncommon
- whateveracct 5mo agoYou'd be surprised how many world class X often have gaps in their fundamentals. In fighting games, I often find great players don't do the technical optimization stuff I do. They're way better without it.
- smilespray 5mo agoI didn't even notice that bit. What broke the show for me was some hot peroxide blonde doing what was really done by a slightly dumpy guy in an isolated office. I just can't watch shows that fictionalize history from my field of work. My dad's a musician and he's the same with his field. I'm fine with that. I read the history book or watch the documentary instead.
- orev 5mo agoIt may have been (probably was) a conscious choice illustrating how new things were (i.e. those people didn’t grow up typing to a level where it was muscle memory). Also, keyboard layouts on early machines were far from standardized (other than the qwerty letters, almost every other symbol was not in a standard location from machine to machine), so even if you knew one machine you might not know others. Most actors and directors put a lot of thought into small details like this, so when you see something like this it’s often intentional.
- kens 5mo agoI'm calling urban legend on the story of an IBM 360 catching fire from an illegal opcode.
- wavemode 5mo agoWell, data centers catch fire all the time. And it stands to reason that an infinite loop could increase power draw and trigger a fire. Though that still wouldn't really be the machine itself catching fire, but the building and/or wiring.
- greenbit 5mo agoThe Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE commands, you could effectively stop the CRT raster scan, leaving the beam parked at the center of the screen. This could burn the phosphors off that spot in a matter of minutes. Not exactly HCF, but a similar vibe. (The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)
- WalterBright 5mo agoIn 1978 I built a single board computer with a 6800 uP and a 6845 to drive the display. Made a keyboard for it, and it worked. Unfortunately, in my many moves it has disappeared, though I still have the schematics for it. Somehow I missed the boat on being a billionaire!
- rigonkulous 5mo agoOh, I have so many of my own experiences to tell in this regard, but .. I'm a little curious .. if you still have the schematics, why not build it again and pick up where you left off? (Disclaimer: I speak as one who has kept almost every computer I've ever hacked on since 1978...)
- WalterBright 5mo agoI could, but the list of projects I want to do is very looooonnnnggggg and reconstructing that machine would be nice to show off, but of no utility. I also no longer have the software I wrote for it, nor the keyboard or monitor. It's all gone. My other regret is I gave away my H11 computer. Sigh.
- rigonkulous 5mo agoOh, well at least scan your schematics in and put 'em on a repo somewhere! That might be inspiring to someone, you never know ..
- jrmg 5mo agoLove how many people here are thinking this is about (or just taking it as an opportunity to talk about) the under-appreciated TV show!
- ScottWRobinson 5mo agoI mean, it is the thing that made me go down this rabbit hole. Need to watch it now!
- LastTrain 5mo agoSo many AI comments. Spamming every post. Backed by AI accounts all with blogs that are less than a year old with 3-6 banal programming projects. WTF man.
- ksenzee 5mo agoHave they been removed? I’m mostly seeing comments from established accounts.
- BikiniPrince 5mo agoNo they are absolutely everywhere. Most people here don’t even know what HCF. This article is nonsense and paints it like some euphemism applied to modern coding. HCF was a joke and no actual implementation was proven. Fucking bots.
- ScottWRobinson 5mo agoAuthor here. I wasn't trying to imply that this is a commonly used phrase nowadays. You can see from the sources I linked, there is definitely history to HCF and even some truth to its phrase. But yes, it was mostly a joke
- youre-wrong3 5mo agoBikiniPrince is an AI bot account. No need to justify anything to him.
- indigodaddy 5mo agoComplete series is at all time low on iTunes/Apple TV, 14.99: https://www.cheapcharts.com/us/itunes/seasons/1745389594 https://www.cheapcharts.com/us/itunes/seasons/1745389594
- lloeki 5mo agoIn the realm of flammable computer parts and adjacent devices, there's the somewhat related lp0 on fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire
- dbg31415 5mo ago> I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire… Go watch it. Great show.
- dreamcompiler 5mo agoI learned the 6800 in college in Texas in the 80s, and it definely had what we called an HCF instruction. I didn't remember the opcode until I read this article. When the show came out I thought it must have been created by one of my classmates because the title is so arcane. Turns out it wasn't but the show definitely captures the vibe of computing in Austin and Dallas in the 80s.
- JKCalhoun 5mo agoStories like these are what endear me to my chosen career. I suspect they hooked me with "byte" and "nybble"… And it just got better the more immersed I got in the history, Jargon Files…
- theturtle 5mo ago[dead]
- FireBeyond 5mo agoI enjoyed it a lot - certainly there's a lot of creative license and there's a slight irony in a show that's trying to portray historical events to have things like Windows 3.1 running on a Sparcstation 5 or countless others. But as someone who was of this era (maybe not so much season 1), I did love it. I actually only just got to watching it this year (and actually just started Season 4 this week).
- caned 5mo agoThis show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the everyday user. There was a sense of wonder, and it didn't envelop your and everyone's life. Most of all, we weren't yet slaves to our computers, and they weren't devices crafted to endlessly grab your attention by any means necessary.
- Forgeties79 5mo ago“It’s the thing that gets you to the thing.”
- UberFly 5mo agoI feel the same way when I work on older cars.
- bblb 5mo agoI'm not a slave to my computer. Stop using bad services that are designed to manipulate your behaviour. There's still the good old Internet out there with genuinely interesting content. IPv8 and it's (eventually mandatory) device-attestation-auth-at-protocol-level will end all of this pseudoanonymous free thinking information exchange. It was good while it lasted.
- rigonkulous 5mo agoA very subjective view - but as originators and not just users of technology, we must be objective, too. There are, genuinely, people out there who will believe anything their phone will tell them to believe. Its not just about 'good old Internet' - its about the literacy rate of the user. Literacy can be assayed by many different metrics - mine, personally (back to the subjective), is this: the ratio between whether the user is capable of programming the computer, compared to the computer, programming the user.
- treyd 5mo ago
- 3we 5mo ago[flagged]
- praptak 5mo agoWhen I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army. This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.
- aa-jv 5mo agoI have worked on systems that have a thermite charge under the RAM and EPROM chips, wired up to GPIO for 'terminate and stay that way' instructions. It is not an urban legend - just a highly protected secret. Those products which require this feature are not usually discussed in consumer circles ..
- casefields 5mo ago>The cryptographic module shall contain tamper response and zeroization circuitry that shall continuously monitor the tamper detection envelope and, upon the detection of tampering, shall immediately zeroize all plaintext secret and private cryptographic keys and CSPs. https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.140-2.pdf https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/fips/nist.fips.140-2.pdf Some more discussion here: https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/cryptologic-histories/history_comsec_ii.pdf https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...
- MomsAVoxell 5mo agoI used to do a lot of ‘junior operator’ work in my youth, which meant functioning as a second pair of hands for the other operators. There were halon systems protecting the computer rooms we operated, and one day I set them off in a most spectacular way by .. forgetting to add a line feed byte alongside the carriage return bytes on one particularly large log .. so one night the paper-feed line printer from IBM that sat in the corner, serving as a hard copy for required logs to be saved, proceed to print every single character in a multi-megabyte log, as quickly as possible, to the same paper position .. over and over again .. catching fire after some minutes and leaving me in the operator chair with a mask on, having to explain to my very irate boss the difference between a print job with cr/lf and one with only cr’s .. Two days later, another more senior operator did the same thing, so it stung a little less after that, but man .. it was not fun knowing that I could burn the place down with a random typo or two (I’d not put ‘tr’ in the right place for the report, d’oh!)
- hks0 5mo agoI had an old projector; If the film roll stopped for any reason (operator error, getting stuck, etc...), the lamp was so bright that it'd catch fire.
- spacedcowboy 5mo agoOne cool thing about this is that there are places where old compilers feared to tread, on the 6502 for example any opcode (apart from $A2, LDX #imm) ending in 2 would be a JAM instruction - CPU just stops. The later CMOS versions still did that for most of the $x2 instructions but some were converted to NOP. So if you're implementing a 6502 in an FPGA, and you want to add (say) stack-relative addressing, there's a nice set of opcodes that you know won't ever be in conflict with the usual ones, because any 6502 ever issuing it would immediately halt (but not catch fire).
- dhosek 5mo agoReading the post, I was immediately reminded of the Big Red Button that was a prominent feature on 80s/90 PCs because of their tendency to end up in a state where a hard reset was the only way out of the lockup. And of course there were the rare cases where even that didn’t work and the only solution was to power-cycle the machine. It’s been years, maybe decades since I’ve encountered that situation and when I have it was a hardware failure, not a software failure as was the case back then.
- riazrizvi 5mo agoThis article subverted my expectations past the first couple of sentences. Nice read. The show is great too btw.
- ____tom____ 5mo agoThe oldest reference I know of to "Halt and Catch Fire" is shown here : https://www.facebook.com/larry.langerholc/photos/d41d8cd9/7401079199914503/ https://www.facebook.com/larry.langerholc/photos/d41d8cd9/74... 1960s era. Humorous instructions for the IBM 360/69. If the image link doesn't work, I've OCRed it: IBM SYSTEM/360 MODEL 69 FEATURES AND DEVICES Early Card Lace 1401 Incompatibility 407 Emulation Chinese Character Set Branch on Burned-Out Indicator Branch on Blinking Indicator Branch and Hang Branch on Chip Box Full Branch on Power Off Branch on Sleepy Operator Inquire and Ignore Reverse Parity and Branch Branch on Bug Read While Write While Ripping Tape Add Improper Divide and Overflow Subtract and Reset to Zero Add and Reset to Zero Scramble Program Status Word Pack Alpha and Drop Zones Pack Program Status Word Punch Invalid Rewind Card Reader Backspace Card Reader Read Print and Blush Forms Skip and Run Away Stacker Select Disk Write Wrong-Length-Record Write Noise Record Seek Record and Scar Disk Eject Disk Rewind Disk Backspace Disk Punch Disk Punch Operator Execute Invalid Op Code Read Card and Scramble Data Select Stacker and Jam Read Invalid Rewind and Break Tape Write Record and Run Away Make Tape Invalid Reverse Drum Immediate Transfer and Lose Return Print and Smear Read Chads Sharpen Light Pencil Transfer and Drop Bits Erase Card Punch Read Inter-record Gap Read Noise Record Erase Read Only Storage Destroy Storage Protect Key Update and Erase Record Move and Drop Bits Circulate Memory Move and Lose Record Move and Wrap Core Move Continuous Execute No-Op and Hang Develope Ineffective Address Halt and Catch Fire Scatter Print Re-initialize Meter Update Transaction Reduce Thruput Print and Break Chain Lose Message and Branch Burst Selector Channel Invert Record and Branch Illogical "or" Illogical "and" Bite Baudy Bit and Branch Triple-Pack Decimal Slip Disk Stacker Upset Uncouple CPU's and Branch Scramble Channels Edit:formatting.
- ____tom____ 5mo agoModern OCR is amazing. That image is full of noise and ChatGPT did it without any errors that a I can see. I compared it to another OCR of the same image, using http://ocr.space http://ocr.space, and ChatGPT was correct in all the small number of differences, even preserving misspellings in the source.
- lowbloodsugar 5mo agoThe Nintendo64 had a halt bug in the MIPS 4300. Doesn’t catch fire though.
- vlucas 5mo agoSpeaking of this show... I can't find all seasons of this on DVD/Bluray anywhere. Seasons 1 and 2 can be found if you have the money, but seasons 3 and 4 are nowhere to be found. I loved this show and would like to own physical copies of it, but they just don't seem to exist anywhere.