New Show on AMC - Halt and Catch Fire - Anyone Watching?

Yeah a renewal for another season could go either way. It will me interesting to see what happens.

 

When it deals with the computer development, the show is fascinating.
When it features the sex lives of Joe and/or Cameron....not so much. I
had never even heard of Lee Pace before this tv series....he should soon
be a huge star.

 

I don't know about that. He's already been around awhile, and I don't think this series is going to be so popular as to rocket anybody to "stardom". He's already been the lead character in a few series - Wonderfalls (which I didn't see) and the criminally unappreciated Pushing Daisies. He also plays an elf in The Hobbit movies.

 

^Agreed. I loved "Pushing Daisies"!

 

Next you're going to tell me that Lee Pace is British or Australian! I did see this
morning, however, that the woman who plays Cameron is a fellow Canadian......

 

I kept watching this and it's gotten better. I didn't see the Slingshot twist coming!

 

Agreed that it's improving. Knowing that there is no way The Giant could succeed given history, we kept wondering what would be the cause of our "heroes" failing.

Spoiler

We figured it would be another "portable" IBM compatible, but didn't expect it to be The Slingshot, nor did we expect the Slingshot's creators! Nice twist, indeed.

The revelation at the end of the episode was done well, with an almost mystical send-up. We were wondering when MacIntosh would get its reveal. "It speaks," indeed!

I liked some of the banter while they were walking around at Comdex, mentioning buggy Windows, etc.

Edit: What actual computer of that time-frame is The Giant referencing? Anyone know? I tried to find images of what the early portables looked like, but don't see anything that looks like The Giant.

 

I don't think there was anything that early that had an LCD screen. The first one that I remember is the Mac Portable .. and that was 1989.

 

So how did a wimpy financial guy who quits TI out of embarrassment of an almost-affair, and a fired hardware hack formerly of Cardiff Electric, put together a working BIOS, and a working portable prototype complete with an LCD deal, in the span of a few months by themselves?

Certainly made for exciting drama, but likely? I don't think so.

 

I agree, unlikely. But good tv.

 

I suspend my level of disbelief when I watch the show for historical accuracy. Last night's episode left me a little cold. The look of the Giant is out of place, it would a few years before portable computers would look like that complete with LCD screen. The first portable that I saw was the Commodore 64 portable and it looked like the Giant.

On a related note, every episode of The Computer Chronicles, an early computer show that aired on PBS is available on YouTube. The hosts are Stewart Cheifet and Gary Kildall, founder of Digital Research. Including this one on portables(with LCD screens) from 1984:

 

The season ended tonight. Most TV people think its not coming back for season two. They wrapped things up nicely.

Best part .. Donna in the pony tails .. yum!

 

Well Lee Pace's talent is sort of wasted as the villain in the New Galaxy movie

 

Yes indeed! Though I think they were pig-tails.

It was mostly a good episode, though I didn't like the scene with Joe torching the truck. Too predictable and his "burn it down to chase some fantasy" act gets old. Plus, do we really think the company would just leave a truck full of $100k of merchandise sitting out front overnight unattended? That seemed a stretch.

 

Interesting finale. Is it coming back? We'll see I guess.

 

Yeah that was an impossible stretch. Even in 1983 that would not have happened. My wife kept saying "where are the security guards"?

 

I don't know if I really care one way or the other whether it comes back. To me, the show is just kind of If it comes back, I'll probably watch, but if it doesn't I won't be upset.

 

The bosses talk about Season 1 and the possibility of Season 2.

http://www.tvguide.com/News/Halt-and-Catch-Fire-Season1-Finale-Postmortem-1085225.aspx

 

I pretty much feel the same way.

 

Thanks for the link. Interesting article.

 

I felt let down by the ending, which I think tried to compress a lot of hard-to-shoot material in a haphazard way. There's a lotta stuff that fell through the cracks, like how they got the overseas plants to crank out so many finished computers so quickly. We're also still left hanging on how the rival company managed to steal their blueprints and create an almost-identical computer.

I think the characters were interesting, but the technology was very hit and miss, to the point where quite a bit of it made no sense. All this mumbo jumbo gobbletygoop about "reverse phase" and "increasing modem speed" and all that crap... it's like Han Solo saying he could "make the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs."

 

Interesting show for me overall. Not perfect by any means, but at least different than most of what is currently on tv, often unpredictable, and mostly quite well done. The finale was not the out-of-the-park home run that I would have liked, but...

Joe's final act before leaving was indeed hard to believe. In keeping with his character for sure, but I agree with what others here have said with regard to the logicistical plausibility.

I think that the Donna character was a missed opportunity. She was a hardware guru with the soul of a musician artist. When she pulled out some of that audio gear from the boxes in her garage earlier in the season, I thought she was going to come up with the idea of integrating some kind of wiz-bang audio chipset in the Giant, ala the Commodore Amiga. Unfortunately, they decided to adhere to history & let Apple steal the thunder.

Kudos to AMC for bringing out a show like this, and seeing it all the way through for a true full season. I kinda hope it doesn't come back though, and it stands as is.

 

There were actually some nuggets of fact in there ...

"Echo cancellation eliminated this problem. Measuring the echo delays and magnitudes allowed the modem to tell if the received signal was from itself or the remote modem, and create an equal and opposite signal to cancel its own. Modems were then able to send over the whole frequency spectrum in both directions at the same time, leading to the development of 4,800 and 9,600 bit/s modems.

Increases in speed have used increasingly complicated communications theory. 1,200 and 2,400 bit/s modems used the phase shift key (PSK) concept. This could transmit two or three bits per symbol. The next major advance encoded four bits into a combination of amplitude and phase, known as Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM).

The new V.27ter and V.32 standards were able to transmit 4 bits per symbol, at a rate of 1,200 or 2,400 baud, giving an effective bit rate of 4,800 or 9,600 bit/s. The carrier frequency was 1,650 Hz. For many years, most engineers considered this rate to be the limit of data communications over telephone networks."

 

I watched the whole series and my impression was that some episodes were better than others.

I went and looked up the theory about the "mythical man month" (wiki has some info) that Cameron referred to. I thought she was correct, but I thought it was basically unbelievable that the "b-school" guy was displaced so quickly. Those guys don't tend to disappear - no matter how much they slow down progress - LOL

The imdb comment board has a lot of interesting comments and links concerning the technology.

Biggest surprise to me was that the Gordon digging a hole in his backyard thing was based on something the founder of Cray supercomputers would do to "relax"...

Best plot twist was the surprise competitor at Comdex.

Most of the speculation on the imdb board is that it was a bluff and the competitor was just trying to get their technology. The fact that they responded with a modified design quickly was the point.

No one on the imdb board agrees with the idea that Cameron's whiz bang question based OS was worth a damn. But given the way the system was architected - they could have placated her by offering to sell two models - one with stripped down hardware - and another with the revolutionary OS.

I don't remember early Macs having a text to speech capability. My university bought the first batch of them off the assembly line - requiring all incoming freshman to buy one. Apple actually created a custom badge (DU - instead of the Apple) for those machines. They were sprinkled all around the campus. You could find a computer anywhere sitting on a table - and use one if you wanted. Oddly, I don't think they were networked when we first got them. I remember using floppys to walk over to a separate machine to print something. Old timers remember those days as "sneaker net"

Those machines might have had speech to text - but I don't remember it. I do remember being fascinated with the mouse - and was completely baffled several years later when I was in grad school and I found someone using a PC with windows (which at the time looked incredibly clunky).

But in 1983, while I was still in college, I had a job writing software for the US Navy and my programs were on punch cards. So a personal computer of ANY sort seemed pretty hi tech at the time.

I had a Unix personal computer from 1986 to 1991 that my employer gave me. It was mostly a way to read email and read news - and edit text files (using vi). It probably seemed clunky to others - but I knew how to get around and do things with it.

 

Ratings for the season finale were not good. AMC may cancel the show after the first season. So typical of the Internet, there's an online petition to save the show. It worked for Family Guy and Futurama.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/253/...ire-the-best-new-television-show-this-season/