Halt and Catch Fire
Episode List
10 GOTO 10.
S01
What a COMPAQ-ly zany idea, take an IBM PC and reverse engineer the only chip that is cannot be bought from another company: the BIOS. It will never catch on.
This takes a trio of crazy people: the visionary sales guy, the reverse engineer, and the “forward” engineer. The sales dude drives the whole plot, the other two are being pulled around, the reality distortion field is strong on that one.
How ironic that Cameron, the software wiz, is the one insisting on gimmicks to sell computers, hippie bullshit about customisation and the like. Or maybe not, she did not live in cynical age of Recall, Siri, and X The Everything App.
S01E01
The sales guy is AWOL from IBM, musing over a PC idea, surfaces on Texas in a chickenshit corporation headed by a 10-gallon hat hillbilly, and executes a crazy move: get a low-paying job as sales rep, rope some engineer into reverse-engineering the BIOS, then leak it to IBM, to force his new employer to invest into actually building a compatible PC, all this to avoid being crushed by lawsuits. Big Blue brings dozens of lawyers to the meeting (swinging past your knees!).
The reverse engineer was stuck in a rut, depressed and apathetic, but that brought him to life, he fixed the Speak-and-Spell and even made an effort to “cook” boxed mac-and-cheese. A low bar, for a classic 80’s mom pulling triple duties: tech wiz at the Speak-and-Spell corporation, homemaker for two kids, and shrink for a fragile tech wiz. They took the kids to see Star Wars: Episode VI, the non-soiled version.
The forward engineer is a wildcard, a rebel without a cause. Defrauding arcades is her hobby, getting fucked by her teacher is not even pleasurable, and now she is roped in to a corporate job, for a promise of big bucks (40k a year, ridiculous inflation!).
The existing manager is about to blow a gasket, but he is no match for a East Coast slick salesman with a RDF. No fucking way.
S01E02
It’s a fuckup, almost from the start. Legally, they are in the clear, but IBM can undercut all their clients and drive them to bankruptcy is a couple of months. The reverse engineer’s marriage is on its honeymoon period, after he was promoted and all. The forward engineer wants to build a better computer, not just another beige box slightly faster.
To raise his standing, our sales man does a rousing speech, cribbed from Steve Jobs. The sales guy gets mocked by his former IBM boss, then tells a sob story about bullying to motivate his underlings. But the forward engineer is smart, she pokes some holes in it. Smart girl!
The Unresolved Sexual Tension between the leads is through the roof. They are literally opening pant zippers, ripping shirts, grunting and gnashing teeth.
S01E03
Everything is going badly. The money is tight, so they downsize, a lot of people were fired and they are pissed. Even the local boss is sleeping on the office, after complaining to the forward engineer about she doing the same.
The software is too damn big, she can’t make it smaller. She blows her first paycheck ever on Twinkies, groceries, and staying in a hotel room with fellow punks she just met. This doesn’t produce insights, maybe fucking the boss will.
The boss itself is scrounging for money everywhere. He sneakily bring in VC from New York, but that does not pan out, the owner is too spooked. They set him up with some hideous local mansion-dweller, something extremely gross to his Hudson Valley sensitivities. To guarantee leverage over that lionised contract, he fucks her consiglieri, someone exuding gay energy. Is he kept for ideological, Deep South reason, like conversion therapy?
The hardware dude, formerly the reverse engineer, can’t make it fit on a suitcase and be faster at the same time. Maybe if they go with his wife’s better idea, of stacking the PCB. She almost invented discrete chiplets. They don’t even decide what to do anyway, he’s too spooked to face the money guy.
S01E04
The money guy is a marketing genius: he calls in a favour from some editor and gets a reporter from a New York magazine in, and engineers a crisis so that reporter shifts from a boring ass company in the middle of nowhere to an underdog taking on massive corporations. Or maybe he will write about a chaotic unprofessional mess, there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
The crisis is so great, they bring in the hardware engineer’s wife, she is an expert. She does the work, but also finds out about the deception. Her husband is firmly inside the reality distortion field, his reaction to thus news is incredible.
Cameron is so immature, she nearly shits bricks when she saw her software vanish. After babysitting the girls and finding out their parents think she is trash, she dumps the kids, takes her car and is about to fuck over their house, but gets cold feet when the fired neighbour comes up with a shotgun. She won’t skimp on backups the next time.
The suit’s little stunt with the local VC made the cops pull him over and give him the Rodney King treatment. He’s not even black! He will rue the days he crossed that woman. I hope the butt stuff was worth it.
S01E05
Cameron suits up for a new day, in her new hotel digs, and finds a middle manager tool breaking her balls for playing Adventure on company time. The company hires a shit load of coders, but she wrote the BIOS, why shouldn’t she be the project manager?
After being mistreated again and again by the money guy, she breaks with him completely, and gets to his house retrieving his stuff. But his dad is there, Joe Senior, he showed his ID to the doorman with authority, and he let him in.
The shoot the shit for a while, and while he seems friendly, after he mentions her dead dad in ‘Nam, she flips out and tells him how full of shit he is.
Just like The Big Lebowski, she uses this to leverage the money guy at work, and takes over project manager duties.
Gordon, the hardware engineer, is suffering from extreme pressure to keep the PC light and small, the only way to do it would be to go with fancy high tech screen: an LCD. It’s expensive, but his father in law has some import export business with the Japanese, so they arrange a meeting. They are willing to cut them some slack in exchange for a cut of the profits.
This deal almost works out, but Gordon gets drunk and starts touching the guys, and running his mouth. He gets to his father in law, and begs him for help, and he comes through. I bet this will generate family strife. The money guy goes meet the Japanese and the morning and apologise, and he gets the deal through.
Gordon did the work on the backend, but the money guy had to go brag about his deal-making skill in front of his team, and Gordon holds back a little, but eventually humiliates him instead. How the tables turned, the carpetbagger from New York suffering verbal judo from a redneck.
I’m almost sorry for the money guy, he was already sore from the police encounter, but now his soul is even more broken. Smashing a Datsun at a local fair in front of Cameron is the only thing that provides respite.
S01E06
A storm is coming. Both literally, and figuratively, since Cameron wants to change the scope of the project again. Working harder, make it better, do it faster, make it stronger, our work is never over…
Since one of coder monkeys has a crush on his boss (and roommate), he programs a custom Adventure build for her. Quoting The Oracle, she is not too bright, and is unable to detect this, but that gives her an idea of turning the boring ass DOS prompt into something resembling Alexa, some proto-AI expert system.
She blackmails the money guy by mocking him for being a corporate suit, instead of a visionary Steve Jobs. Gordon is easier to manipulate, sexually, as revenge for him outing her intimate knowledge of the boss.
The money guy gets invited to Gordon’s house, but he is out hunting for a Garbage Patch Kid during an hurricane. He gets scammed, and literally breaks a store window to get them!
The money guy gets a lecture from Donna (Gordon’s wife), about how his original version of a faster and cheaper IBM PC, but portable is brilliant, and he entertains the kids, but he then gets lonely and fucks Cameron, which means he is also swayed by the true visionary.
S01E07
The machine has a name: Contrail. Or Giant, one of them. It also has two cases: a fancy Jonny Ive-like futuristic one, and a beige box. The money guy setup the fancy case, he brought in some industrial designer he dated years ago, them unceremoniously dumped the moment he expresses his love.
Turns out that Jonny Ive expy is dying, and he wanted to meet the money guy one last time, and the excuse was designing a computer case for his portable IBM clone. Shit, he really loved him. Cameron is in the dump now, she not only has a ex-boyfriend cramping her style, she is afraid that the money guy will dump her too.
As for the case itself, they will go with the space age stuff. The backup beige box meeting happens in a strip club, where the designer mocks the corporate head’s divorce, and calls the money guy a poofter. The corporate manager defies Texan expectations and slugs the guy right then and there. Space Age case it is.
Gordon is also in the doghouse. Donna left for a meeting, he stayed with the kids, but he gets drunk, decides to “cook” some shit and dump the lasagne, then he takes the trash compactor apart during a weekday, then digs a massive grave-like hole in the backyard, while ranting about his grandma Klondike adventures, and PT Barnum stealing a giant farmer golem or something.
Let’s not even get into Donna getting drunk and kissing her boss, but he wouldn’t reciprocate. She has read the same signs as me, but he’s also married. They were clearly flirting with one another for a while, she’s in the clear in my book.
S01E08
What do you know, Bosworth, the big boss manager, drank the Kool Aid from the New York carpetbagger, he not only mortgaged his house to keep the PC project afloat, he roped Cameron into hacking the bank to give them more money. Seems about as ethical as most VC funded startups, fake it ‘till you make it. Technically, it’s more like Skunkworks, something literally referenced in the first episode.
Gordon has quick wits, he dismantled the prototype, then waited for the feds to vacate the property to steal it. He’s go everything figured out, they go to COMDEX, the CES of its day, and use the money to keep the company afloat. The money guy has to sell his Porsche, he will grumble about it for a while.
Donna is at her wits end, she sends the kids to her mother. She is about to dump Gordon, but they gets an emotional one-two punch of using the damn computer, and finding the engagement ring from their wedding. This makes he reconsider, she will get on the team, probably using her Susan Fairchild alias.
Bosworth takes one for the team, the father figure that Cameron needed. She lost her father in Vietman, and found another in a suit. The money guy went all the way to his dad’s home, to confirm the rumour that IBM was working on a portable PC, and accepted being reintegrated into the Borg, as the head of the PC division. That Judas, that Cypher! He gets better though, for now.
Ironically, a good outcome for them would be getting acquihired by IBM itself, at least that’s the current prevailing ethos.
S01E09
COMDEX is it. Even though the feds have seized the bank account, they have enough cash and wits to swindle some printer dudes out of their suite, shrimp cocktails, and even some podunk booth.
There is still time for multiple fuckups. The big one is of course that Donna’s old boss and their disgruntled neighbour presented a very similar PC (the boss quit TI after receiving a fax from Gordon. Now we know why he was outside her home, we was conspiring with the other guy). This is freaking insane, turns out designing a new portable is no biggie, it dampens the heroic struggle of the protagonists.
On the first night they get there, there is some hardware issue, probably due to the fact they carried that thing on a station wagon for thousands of miles to Vegas. This is really important, because Gordon has time to remove the interactive stuff, remove the extra RAM, and include a install generic DOS.
Since their computer is now a generic beige box, Cameron revolts, and refuses to join them. She met some Californians and they were friendly, they are working is a corporate research lab called Xerox PARC, and of course the dude brags about Ethernet, Object-Oriented programming, the whole shebang. She might as well go full hippie and move to Frisco.
Donna nearly punches her old boss, but Gordon is also pissed, because she doesn’t hide she wanted to have an affair, since Gordon has been neglecting his husband duties for a while. The money guy is really sad Cameron is gone.
They do their demo, with a boring-ass sales pitch about Lotus 1-2-3 in the day, and some weird computer game with the kids in the evening, but it’s good enough for the big distributor that guarantees nearly 100k sales upfront.
They open a champagne bottle, but are all pretty gloomy. The money guy fetches some ice, wanders into another suite, and sees something incredible: a Macintosh talking (like a Speak-and-Spell). Suddenly, Cameron was right…
S01E10
The three founders went their separate way. Cameron is pissed her fancy Zork-like was abandoned, and the money guy is pissed at her for leaving, so he tries and fails to delay shipment to incorporate some Macintosh-like killer app. He even burns down the first shipment, and walks into the sunset, in some unknown location.
Cameron is still bored, living in hotels, she worms her way into one of the Baby Bells and discovers you can improve the performance with the same hardware, up to 9600 baud. That’s almost 10kbps, outstanding speed. She can send a pixel art Jason Vorhees picture across the phone. She tested this on company property, so she gets fired (this is before the CFAA, I guess). After all the Cardiff coders are poached to her anarchist startup with barely any capital (just credit card fraud), she even convinces Donna to come work for her, on some MUD.
Yes, the owner of Cardiff gives 4% of the company to each one of the protagonists, so they are fucking loaded now. Gordon buys a red Porsche, tailored suits, even shaves his beard, but then gets carjacked on the way home.
The money guy doesn’t care about money, he is Steve Jobs after all. No kids yet, I hope they put an Apple Lisa reference somewhere. I guess Season 2 will be about the early Internet.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.