[IBCNU]

And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.

I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk.

Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season.

What's so great about it is:

- mushroom theory of management works - trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible - throw all the corporate bs away, just build - competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works - real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down

as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show!

[tptacek]

Season 1 is Soul of a New Machine-ish, but about personal computing, not minicomputers, and is set in Texas.

Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas.

Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA.

Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA.

[ai_critic]

The problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though.

[hibikir]

I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution.

[npunt]

1000%. One of the big reasons I love Halt & Catch Fire is because their reach exceeds their grasp and they were too early for the ideas they dreamed of. I wrote a piece, partly inspired by the show, on category-defining products and how many factors have to line up for a product to become category-defining:

https://nickpunt.com/blog/category-defining-products/

[Nevermark]

So many people have been there. Working to put something together, but with gaps that are hard to close. I have been there.

Even billionaires like Zuck bite off more than they can chew and flail around.

For that matter, Jobs at NeXT succeeded in an unlikely way in the end. But for much of NeXT's existence it chronically couldn't get enough traction. They ended up droping the hardware. Then down purposed their OS into a developer platform to run on other OS's. So disappointing. But they did such good work, when Apple had a need, they were ready.

[leoc]

And NeXT was the spiritual successor to Apple's internal "Big Mac" project which never even made it to market before it was killed. (The project leader Rich Page and others started phoning the already-fired Jobs, begghing him to step in, when Big Mac was deep-sixed.) The Mac had come after the Xerox Star, which failed commercially, and the Apple Lisa, which failed commerically: then it too nearly failed commercially, until the desktop-publishing market finally came together around it. And even then industry wiseacres like John C. Dvorak had years more fun mocking it (not completely without justification) as an extravagant toy and a market also-ran.

[deaddodo]

Yeah, agreed. Watching it as a drama, it’s fun. Watching it with any perspective on tech history it gets a little cringy.

The first season is semi-accurate if you just replace Compaq with their company. But it quickly goes off the rails.

[cestith]

Of course Compaq was Houston rather than DFW. The case design for the first portable was scribbled on the back of a paper placemat at the House of Pies diner on Westheimer.

They still could have had Donna working at TI, which has a presence there.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

I lost interest in the second season. S1 was great, though.

[tptacek]

S2 is the weakest season, and S1 isn't the strongest.

[icedchai]

S2 was super fun though. The BBS period brought back nostalgia.

[alexjplant]

During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous.

So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such.

[jhbadger]

It also annoyed me that the Commodore 64s used for their online service were shown with DOS prompts. I think the set designers thought "Commodore 64s are old; old computers ran DOS; therefore Commodore 64s ran DOS"

[vel0city]

Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc.

[EarlKing]

Correction: Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and QuantumLink (insofar as Mutiny is QuantumLink, anyway). Season 3 can be roughly summarized as "LOL, Norton".

[arscan]

My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.

[acomjean]

DG = data general a “large” computer company in Westboro mass. My mom worked there doing internationaliztion.

Soul of a new machine is a fantastic book. About DG going up against DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and their Vax machines.

[myself248]

> I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era.

Please do! Ephemera like that can tell more sides of the story that didn't make it into the book, for whatever reason.

[arscan]

I got the sense that Kidders side was approximately equal to my father’s side, as my father said he provided a lot of information to the author through interviews and was happy with the account that ended up in the book. I’ll see what I can find though.

I ended up working for the lead of the competing team within DG (whose product lost to the book’s protagonist) for many years right after college at a different company he founded. I suspect he has a slightly different perspective on the whole thing, but I never asked.

Sadly my father and many of his contemporaries are no longer with us. But I’m really happy that this book exists as a durable & accurate snapshot of the period. The computer history museum also has a wonderful collection of interviews worth checking out, which includes several of the staff from DG [1]

1. https://computerhistory.org/oral-histories/

[randrus]

I joined DG in their last days, largely due to kidders book.

Also, I really liked DG/UX, for reasons I no longer recall.

[IBCNU]

amazing lore!

[unmole]

> And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine.

I've only watched the first season and really don't see the link to Soul of a New Machine.

[LambdaComplex]

You just reminded me that I got about halfway through Soul of a New Machine. Maybe I'll pick it back up this week.