Anybody watch the first episode of the new AMC series "halt and catch fire? Looks like it might be a good series. About guy's in the 80's making the first IBM PC clone. One of the lead character's wife also works for TI, so lots of geek appeal in it.

 

I remember the "halt and catch fire" bit, it was mentioned in an article in an early microprosser magazine, had to do with undocumented commands people had found in microprocessors. one microprocessor had a habit of running away under ccertain conditions and writing 1's and 0's to every location in memory, while ignoring the reset and nonmaskable interupt.

 

Hmmmm... I sense conspiracy theories going off the " richter scale "

 

Anybody watch the first episode of the new AMC series "halt and catch fire? Looks like it might be a good series. About guy's in the 80's making the first IBM PC clone. One of the lead character's wife also works for TI, so lots of geek appeal in it.

Just watched it from the DVR, and haven't decided about it yet. Obligatory rough sex scene at the beginning (yawn). Predictable characters: smarta$$ sales guy, underappreciated engineer, and ingenious ingenue. And what I think was a guy cutting a beer can in half with a soldering iron?

I will watch at least one more episode.

 

Tracecom, thats what I'm going to do too. Sometimes the first episode of a series is pretty lame, just to set up the characters. The AMC "Turn" series was that way. There are some pretty good series out now, "Longmire" on A&E, and "Those that kill" on LMN, to me are real good.

Packratking, don't get the conspiracy comment?? Would you expand on it?

 

Watched it. I'll give it a show or two more. We will see how the writers do.

I like Longmire too. I have friends that don't much care for Longmire. Their loss.

 

@Inquisitive, both Longmire and Those that Kill have a similar style that I like. They both combine parts of one episode into a later episode. Makes you keep thinking, something in one episode that they show for a few minutes pops up in a new episode later and gets explained in more detail.

 

I'm really surprised that more of the people on this forum aren't interested in the Halt and Catch Fire. Guess if they put Zombies in it, it would be watched more.

 

I hardly watch TV series anymore.
I got burned with LOST badly; too much investment for a blatant cash-in and lazy writing at the end.
Breaking Bad didn't hold me past the middle of the 4th season either.
I never touched Game of Thrones.
To be honest, I prefer spending my now limited time on selected Youtube channels.

In general, I find modern US TV series boring and repetitive. They advertize engaging plots and thick suspense, but how can one keep in doing that after a few hours, let alone a few seasons.
Only series that are based on acting, character development and clever dialog are worth continuing over more than one season, such as House M.D.. House was such a fun character to watch, regardless of what was going on around him.
Another example is SpongeBob Squarepants. It's a show you don't watch for the plot or the suspense. It's just very cleverly and absurd humour involving very clear-cut and funny characters. At least for the first few seasons. I haven't watched an episode lately.

I also follow mini-series now and then, such as Black Mirror, which I watch now. I highly recommend it, but it's a bit harsh.

However, I do have my guilty pleasures myself. I pick an anime series from time-to-time and watch the s#$t out of it. But that's only about once a year or so.

 

I got burned with LOST badly; too much investment for a blatant cash-in and lazy writing at the end.

I feel exactly the same way. What a rip!

 

I'm really surprised that more of the people on this forum aren't interested in the Halt and Catch Fire.

What day does it come on, and how can I catch up? BTW, anyone watch HBO's "Silicon Valley?"

 

Sundays 10pm EST on AMC. You can watch episode 1 "I/O" at AMC's website. Other sites charge a fee, AMC is free

 

I'm there!

 

Well, episode two wasn't much better than episode one. More about the people than the work they're doing.

 

Packratking, don't get the conspiracy comment?? Would you expand on it?

... had to do with undocumented commands people had found in microprocessors. the conspiracy theory about chip-producers building spyware into refrigerator and / or coffeemaker controls... that kind of crap...

 

Well, episode two wasn't much better than episode one. More about the people than the work they're doing.

I just watched it from the DVR. May be too far out for me; I found the street meeting completely unbelievable and didn't really understand what Joe's motivational story was all about. If it doesn't get better in episode 3, I'll spend my time on something else. As someone else said, more tech would be better.

 

one slight problem with the shoe, if they were ripping off ibm for processor code, and they were TI engineers, the TI series processor was NOTHING likie the ones used in IBM, ti9900 and intel 8086 share no code similarities.

 

Only the wife of the bearded guy worked for TI. The company doing the clone is "Cardiff Electric" a software company.

 

and the guys they claim were two TI engineers. still, the embeded rom software they ripped off from the ibm pc would not work iin any TI products of the day.

 

conspiricy theory? I was not refering to a conspiricy theory, there was an artical in one of the origional magazines, I dont remember which, since I subscribed to almost all, 80 micorcomputing, kilobaud, and such. it was an artical about a guy who went hunting for un documented commands. most were leftovers from testing programs, where the factory tests are run, and some were just stuff leftover that somebody forgot to clear out. when you have only 52 commands in an 8 bit processor, there is a lot of command words left over, and any leftover bits can do something unexpected.