Halt and Catch Fire

thisisauserid

This article is deadbeef on arrival.

burnte

It was a fun show. I really enjoyed it, a fictional run through the 80s and 90s computing industries.

scar

There's such an annoying scene in the first episode of that show that kinda broke the immersion for me. They introduced Cameron Howe as some sort of world class hacker that could do anything so one of her first scenes was her typing something.. and typing she did, one finger at a time. I mean, wtf. World class hacker that literally types one finger at a time, like she had never used a keyboard before. That scene nearly made me quit the show right there and then. Whenever I see that actress in something else I just can't help but think back about she couldn't even be bothered to learn how to type.

kens

I'm calling urban legend on the story of an IBM 360 catching fire from an illegal opcode.

greenbit

The Commodore PET 4032 video system was generated by a 6545 (6845 equivalent) cathode ray tube controller, which generated the video buffer addresses and the HS and VS sync pulses. This was memory mapped and if one was not careful with POKE commands, you could effectively stop the CRT raster scan, leaving the beam parked at the center of the screen. This could burn the phosphors off that spot in a matter of minutes. Not exactly HCF, but a similar vibe. (The PET had its own monitor that, unlike common composite monitors of the era, apparently would not continue to scan when the sync went away)

jrmg

Love how many people here are thinking this is about (or just taking it as an opportunity to talk about) the under-appreciated TV show!

LastTrain

So many AI comments. Spamming every post. Backed by AI accounts all with blogs that are less than a year old with 3-6 banal programming projects. WTF man.

indigodaddy

Complete series is at all time low on iTunes/Apple TV, 14.99: https://www.cheapcharts.com/us/itunes/seasons/1745389594

lloeki

In the realm of flammable computer parts and adjacent devices, there's the somewhat related lp0 on fire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lp0_on_fire

dbg31415

> I have never watched the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire… Go watch it. Great show.

dreamcompiler

I learned the 6800 in college in Texas in the 80s, and it definely had what we called an HCF instruction. I didn't remember the opcode until I read this article. When the show came out I thought it must have been created by one of my classmates because the title is so arcane. Turns out it wasn't but the show definitely captures the vibe of computing in Austin and Dallas in the 80s.

JKCalhoun

Stories like these are what endear me to my chosen career. I suspect they hooked me with "byte" and "nybble"… And it just got better the more immersed I got in the history, Jargon Files…

FireBeyond

I enjoyed it a lot - certainly there's a lot of creative license and there's a slight irony in a show that's trying to portray historical events to have things like Windows 3.1 running on a Sparcstation 5 or countless others. But as someone who was of this era (maybe not so much season 1), I did love it. I actually only just got to watching it this year (and actually just started Season 4 this week).

caned

This show captures much of what I miss about computing in the 80s and 90s. You could get your hands on hardware, be able to largely understand what all the hardware and software was doing. You mostly used computers as tools, which only accepted commands and didn't try to affect your decisions or workflow (yes, there was Clippy). The leaps forward in computing power, memory and storage were more impactful to the everyday user. There was a sense of wonder, and it didn't envelop your and everyone's life. Most of all, we weren't yet slaves to our computers, and they weren't devices crafted to endlessly grab your attention by any means necessary.

praptak

When I studied CS one of our professors told us the US military had chips with self destruct ops in the 1980s. I could never confirm this particular story but there was a much later DARPA program which aimed at self destructing electronics for the army. This article makes me think the professor's story might be an urban legend based on such an accidental opcode.