For people who are interested in this era, Halt and Catch Fire is a terrific portrayal of the sorts of characters and battles that defined it, albeit from more of a startup perspective.
I really enjoyed the first season (especially the first couple of episodes) as the focus of the story is the release of the product and the struggles associated with it.
The second season seems to become the typical personal drama / relationship / betrayal / writers kung-fu story arch / etc. that every series comprising more than one season seems to spiral into these days.
It's extremely contrived and deus-ex-machina all the way through.
The "history" the show goes over is crammed into it's Drama first story. The history is there for nostalgia bait, not to celebrate the history or educate. That's why pretty much everything interesting that happened in computing was mangled into coming from the same like 5 people.
And the characters are all just narcissistic assholes who are self destructive because it means the show gets to carry on for another season. It also has the cliche density to feel like a high schooler's homework project.
If you find yourself addicted to reality TV drama, you will enjoy it.
Imagine if you tried to take "It's always sunny in Philadelphia" seriously, and also were watching it because you cared about Philadelphia history. I felt actively patronized the whole time.
I was annoyed by the C64's that were shown as having "C:>" prompts as if they were MS-DOS machines. I think I get where that was coming from -- people who were too young to remember the period were designing the sets and vaguely remembered that "old-timey" computers had "C:>" prompts and given that C64's are old computers, assumed they did too.
Wrong. That's like saying the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey/Maturin novels are "contrived." Hello, it's fiction. It isn't there to educate, except insofar as the situations the characters find themselves in teach you something about what it was like back then.
The acting is horrible. The writing is terrible. The story veers off into areas unrelated. There is a moment of a thoroughly unrelated homosexual encounter. (What was the point of that?!) Moments I know that are so really stretched too far to be believable. And on and on.
I lived through that era, too. As historical fiction, HACF is pretty decent. "areas unrelated" -- hello, it's FICTION about a specific era, and, without knowing what specifically you're talking about: maybe those "unrelated" areas are period-setting, or character-developing.
HACF not for you. Let's leave it at that. You can't please everyone.
The second season seems to become the typical personal drama / relationship / betrayal / writers kung-fu story arch / etc. that every series comprising more than one season seems to spiral into these days.
So, highly recommend the first season!