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  • HCF Halt and Catch Fire

    From August Abolins@2:221/360 to All on Sun May 10 21:09:08 2020
    I just learned of this series:

    Halt and Catch Fire is an American period drama television series... aired on the cable network AMC in the United States from June 1, 2014, to October 14, 2017, spanning four seasons and 40 episodes...
    ....Taking place over a period of more than ten years, the series depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution of the 1980s and the growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s. The show's title refers to computer machine code instruction Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), the execution of which would cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working (catch fire being a humorous exaggeration).

    It sounds very interesting for a computer nerd.

    Has anyone else here seen it?

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  • From Mike Powell@1:2320/105 to AUGUST ABOLINS on Sun May 10 18:51:00 2020
    @MSGID: <5EB84FBA.883.clascomp@capitolcityonline.net>
    I just learned of this series:

    It sounds very interesting for a computer nerd.

    Has anyone else here seen it?

    Yes, I enjoyed it... the episodes about the technical stuff more than some
    of the others that get more into the interpersonal stuff. That is also
    good TV but I really got into their push to build a PC and some of their
    later endeavors.

    Mike

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  • From John Riley@1:229/981 to August Abolins on Wed May 13 13:05:22 2020

    instruction Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), the execution of which would
    cause the computer's central processing unit to stop working (catch fire

    Yep, specifically on the 6800 series CPU's.

    Has anyone else here seen it?

    Just starting watching it again during my morning excercises :)

    Cheers
    J

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  • From Mike Powell@1:2320/105 to AUGUST ABOLINS on Thu May 14 17:16:00 2020
    I dragged myself through episode 3 (1st season). There was stuff in there that
    seemed unnecessary and a bit of a distraction.

    There is a lot of stuff like, too. IIRC, it almost did not come back for a second season.

    I think it was in episode 2 that the ex-IBM guy convinces the engineer to use h
    s own money to buy the computer equipment for reverse engineering. I found that
    unrealistic. The ex-IBM guy is surely still quite wealthy (fancy car, fancy ap
    rtment, fancy clothes, etc..) Yet, it is the family-man who has to come up with
    the money for the computer equipment? That made little sense.

    If I remember right, it makes sense later.

    The production values feel like a low-budget Canadian series. I can look past >hat and focus on the tech/engineering elements. I read that things pick up nic
    ly in ep 4 and onward.

    Yes, it does do that. It may have been a partially Canadian production,
    come to think of it. A lot of the US cable shows are.

    Except for using the early unix-based networked computers on campus, my first u
    e of a PC was a genuine IBM PC in my first professional job in 1993. But even >here, I primarily worked with a DEC VAX 11 machine. I had a shared terminal pa
    ked just outside my cubicle intended to be split between 5 people. Honestly, I
    can't remember what I needed to use it for except to lookup or print some basic
    reports based on parts inventory. Boring! But I did help some people "fix" th
    ir report programs when they needed a special feature.

    I got an 8088 XT clone around Christmas, 1987. My first on the job
    experience with computers would have come about a year later, working in a library, with some terminal system that ran on who knows what. :)

    A couple years later, I had a 286/AT AMD based. I started goofing around with >RBBS BBS software on that.

    RBBS is supposedly open source now (may have been then, too). I have
    thought about playing around with it some one day, but never seem to get
    around to it.

    Mike

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  • From Mike Powell@1:2320/105 to AUGUST ABOLINS on Thu May 14 19:15:00 2020
    CORRECTION. I meant, "1983" I hate using the top row of keys for the number
    ! I tend to overcompensate and miss.

    LOL I prefer the number pad also. :)

    Mike


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