Unfortunate Result

I had high hopes for AMC's new "Halt and Catch Fire."  It's great to see the pie man back on TV.  And the subject is one that I'm very interested in, as I've been involved with computers since well before the introduction of the PC.

From the start, though, the show went off the rails.  They tried to explain the title with a "definition" that was complete gibberish.  That phrase doesn't refer to an actual computer instruction or program; it's an old joke.  And, sadly, it seems that the folks working on that show didn't get the joke.

Back then, writing in assembly was more common than it is today.  Just for fun, many people made lists of fake instructions and passed them around by photocopies and pinning them to bulletin boards in office hallways.  Typical entries were "Rewind and Stretch Tape," "Jump To Random Location," and "Execute Operator."  No machine had those instructions.  They were jokes, as was "Halt and Catch Fire."  But they missed that entirely.

That was just the start.  They missed the boat in so many ways that it's hard to count them.  I don't want to just pick nits -- the pattern "on, on, off, on" or 1101 is a hexadecimal D, not a B -- but the basic plot points are way off the mark.  The BIOS wasn't in any way the "secret sauce."  It just does basic hardware initialization, a little bit of self-test, and then loads bootstrap code from a floppy drive or (back then) a cassette recorder.  Heck, IBM published the source code in the technical reference manual!  And if you wanted to extract the ROM contents, even back then, it wouldn't be as crazily hard as it was portrayed for dramatic purposes.  You can just read the memory.

So, it's already headed in a bad direction, and it's hard to see why that's the case.  The real story has all sorts of interesting twists and turns -- just google "Gary Kildall" for part of it -- and it's a shame to see the opportunity squandered.  I'll keep watching for a few episodes, hoping that they'll turn it around, but it's not looking good so far.  Instead of portraying life in a start-up, though, it seems to be mimicking the failure of one.