Starting Halt And Catch Fire for the third or fourth time. Still wish it ended with the armadillo turning out to be alive somehow.

People who love Halt And Catch Fire always seem to say season one, while great, is the least great of the four. I really love it. I’m on the episode where Donna restores the fried drives and I find that stuff so fascinating. I like to watch YouTubes of old computers and stuff.

The history of personal computing is fascinating. I read as much as I can understand, not being an engineer or programmer. Halt does a great job of showing how Joe understands just enough to see why it’s MASSIVE. In that way he’s like Jobs, but unlike Jobs he’s always too late.

I think my generation is the last one who remembers life before the Mac/the Web and could see things changing as it happened. I get a rush going back and looking at how the earliest advances changed things so seemingly minutely, but are things we can’t imagine living without now.

And not just ancient computer history. QuickLook was only introduced in 2007. Can you imagine using a Mac without it? When you watch the keynote where Jobs introduced it, the crowd goes nuts. In 2000 when he showed a Save As box connected to its document’s window, people ROARED.

I love this scene where Cameron takes over the coding dept by firing everyone who didn’t cheat on a computer game.

Main story in S1 is the struggle over Cameron’s interactive operating system. Cameron knows the machine could be better, but it means starting over. Gordon thinks it’s fine the way it is; do better next time. The show challenges you to choose perfection or pragmatism. Like life.

Joe is the viewer. “I want to do something great...but I also want to do something successful.” Donna tells the truth: the existing machine actually is both. Her role in this season is to always be right; the voice in our heads that we always ignore in favor of our own vanity.

Boz tells Cameron a hard truth: “Be careful. No matter what they say, a lot of people are waiting for you to shit the bed on this.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re the future. Ain’t nothing scarier than that.”

My read on the title sequence is it’s an electron or something on its way through “the world of electrons or something” to power the LED on the front of an old desktop PC. Kind of liken Tron. https://twitter.com/curiousgeek82/status/1287365234848600064?s=21 https://twitter.com/curiousgeek82/status/1287365234848600064

I find myself siding against Cameron on the question of the OS in season one. To her it’s perfection or nothing. Joe decides to live to fight another day. I dare say most people watching would be Joe, but if you’re a Cameron who actually built the thing, you’d feel differently.

Favorite scene in the whole series might be when, after all the battles fought and people lost and relationships decimated in this fight for the future of PCs, Joe wanders into this hushed candlelit room where the first Macintosh is booting up. It’s like a religious experience.

Cameron was right about where things were going. Joe didn’t make something great. The true great thing is so far ahead of him he’s almost speechless. The weight of this is crushing. But he’s also in awe of it. In a spiritual sense he’s lost but in a another sense he’s renewed?

The scene where I slap my own face every time I rewatch this series: when Joe and Gordon watch the Apple 1984 commercial and observe that the woman who threw the sledgehammer into IBM looks exactly like Cameron. OF COURSE. My professional jealousy is off the fucking charts.

Low key MVP of season one: Debbie.

There’s a great moment at the end of season one, after Joe’s left, where Gordon finds himself in charge but with no new ideas. It’s almost unspoken but the point is, without a Steve Jobs figure nothing would have gotten done. In a more intimate sense, Gordon needs his partner.

My Halt and Catch Fire rewatch has brought me to the first episode credited to @Beckylooo, hero of legend from my high school, the WGA, and the writers rooms of Hannibal and The Americans, among others.

In her episode, Joe pitches what will one day be the fucking internet.

I don’t know if younger people can appreciate how insane an idea like the internet (as we know it) seemed in the ancient world. And the show doesn’t cheat by making Joe predict Facebook or something silly like that. Even he can barely explain why this matters, and no one gets it.

“Tell me about Texas.”

“It’s like any other place. Except more so.”

Good line.

Something I didn’t notice on my last rewatch was Cameron finding herself in the same situation with Mutiny as with the Giant. You can take $25m now and risk losing your company’s soul. Or you can make your company perfect, but risk going out of business. Choose.

Joe makes a joke about a Halloween costume; “Batman was sold out.”

I’ve always thought Lee Pace would make a great Batman.

“What do I do?”

“It's so hard to bring about actual change, real change. And the whole world conspires to stop that from happening. But you bring people together. You create change.“

Halt And Catch Fire reminds us that the World Wide Web began on a single NeXt computer, a machine invented by Steve Jobs that was compatible with nothing.

“The NeXT is a state-of-the-art system!”

“Designed by a disgraced megalomaniac who loves form over function.”

I unironically love that the demonstration of the NeXt’s state of the art technology is using a web browser and playing Go West at the same time. That song is a jam.

Halt and Catch Fire: the network Gordon ran in SF; was that a kind of smaller closed service like AOL or Prodigy? Or even Mutiny? Or was it something else? Just not quite sure what his business is at the start of season 4; this era predates my online experience.

America Online ad from the 90s. It’s funny to see how “internet” was a button you had to click to get to the web. At the time everybody mocked this closed, curated, safe service, where you’d get banned for being an asshole.

It’s amazing that a few acronyms and names seemed to control the future of the world and always would, and then they just died or were absorbed or transformed or otherwise vanished: AOL, MCI, Netscape, Yahoo, Dell, IBM, Nokia...

There’s a scene in Halt And Catch Fire where they play a Doom death match on old computers that is such a flashback for me. Giant, slow-ass computers, lugged to your friend’s house, cables everywhere, some set up on the floor. Disgusting. But at the time it felt AMAZING.

Did anyone else play Rise of the Triads (I think it was called?)? Or maybe it was Unreal? All I remember was this supremely satisfying feature where you could get on some kind of pad that would launch you into the sky and you could look down on the map and just shoot anyone.

@ifyoucantwell how did you guys handle all the old interfaces? Did you find old machines and run them for real, or were they some kind of simulation?