Halt and Catch Fire, last year’s AMC drama about the early-’80s nascent period of personal computers, wound up not really living up to its initial promise. For those into such things as computer engineering, it was an even sharper sting because for one shining episode Halt and Catch Fire was not just a good drama, it was also a love letter to computer architecture. Assembly instructions! On TV!
It was an alternate, rare view of people that make computers happen. Halt and Catch Fire gave us engineering geniuses rather than the spoiled Silicon Valley that so often shades computer science now (however accurate, sadly). The pilot offers us much less so the personality/period dramas of the series as a whole, but a real-world techno-thriller as two sides of the technology world (pitchman: Joe, and builder: Gordon) join forces to reverse-engineer an early IBM PC. In the mythos of the PC revolution, it was an act of liberation.
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What they were doing was dangerous—begging the wrath of IBM’s lawyer army—but also noble. Personal computing wasn’t just a technology revolution but a revolution in how computers were viewed by the industry and, eventually, the consumer public.
The machines were already there in IBM’s catalog, but the notion of selling them to everyday people in addition to accounting departments and engineers was as foreign as the idea of hooking consumers up to the ARPANET. Someone just had to come along and plant the seed.
Feel free to continue on with the first season—it’s on Netflix as of a couple of weeks ago. It’s worth watching and it winds up adding some important perspectives (women in tech, proto-internet idealism), but it also winds up being a mess of competing purposes. Someone important clearly wanted to the show to become the next Mad Men, and a lot of the time it feels like there two series battling it out: an ’80s period drama and a diamond-sharp show about one of technology’s most important moments.
In the process, both aspects of the show wind up weaker and a bit muddy. At its worst, watching Halt and Catch Fire would make me keep wondering if I’d missed something from an earlier episode or scene, but, at it’s best, it was the show about computers and the people that love and build computers I would have made myself as one of those people. A drama about engineering, why did it take so long?
Halt and Catch Fire was renewed for a second season and it debuts next month. I maintain some hope that it’s allowed to live up to its potential as a show about a misunderstood period of technological evolution/revolution, but we’ll see soon enough.
