Rybags Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/ Set in the early 1980s, series dramatizes the personal computing boom through the eyes of a visionary, an engineer and a prodigy whose innovations directly confront the corporate behemoths of the time. Their personal and professional partnership will be challenged by greed and ego while charting the changing culture in Texas' Silicon Prairie. Only just noticed this. Grabbing a torrent now. No idea if it centres on real or ficticious characters, or any of the pioneering companies we all know. Just hoping it's not all about Steve Jobs. Docs and dramas of such events that just centre on IBM, Apple & HP tend to piss me off. See how this one goes. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 (edited) This is the first I've heard of the movie.If it hasn't been released yet, I'd be cautious of grabbing a torrent. Could be an RIAA thing. Named after HCF, the Motorola 680X self test instruction which endlessly cycles through addresses on the buss.It was jokingly called HCF (Halt and Catch Fire) as a reference to early CPUs that implemented a halt instruction as a jump to self (same address endlessly).This made those address wires literally get hot and start smoking. At least that's what I've read. Sometimes it's difficult to tell what is fact and what is folk lore. Edited May 20, 2014 by JamesD Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+bcombee Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 My understanding is that it's loosely based on the founding of Compaq who made the first 100%-IBM PC compatible by doing a "Chinese Wall" reverse engineering of the PC's BIOS (one team of engineers reverse engineered it and wrote a spec, another team used that spec to make a new implementation). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snicklin Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 My understanding is that it's loosely based on the founding of Compaq who made the first 100%-IBM PC compatible by doing a "Chinese Wall" reverse engineering of the PC's BIOS (one team of engineers reverse engineered it and wrote a spec, another team used that spec to make a new implementation). And as you mention "Compaq", who were bought up by "HP", yes, this is about HP! sort of... I don't mind though as I used to work for them, so it may be of some interest. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AtariGeezer Posted May 20, 2014 Share Posted May 20, 2014 I downloaded the video this morning, still need to watch it. It's a 50 minute preview of season 1, episode 1... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JamesD Posted May 21, 2014 Share Posted May 21, 2014 (edited) The preview is up on vudu for free.*edit* The preview on vudu is 3 minutes long Edited May 21, 2014 by JamesD Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
UKRetrogamer Posted May 21, 2014 Share Posted May 21, 2014 (edited) It's not a movie but a series. The preview on AMC's site is from Season 1, Episode 1. The whole reverse-engineering the IBM PC thing seems to be based on Compaq's first IBM PC clone but that story alone can't be enough to fill a season, let alone a series. I wonder where it'll go from there. It'd be nice to see some of the industry's major players feature in the series with maybe the odd cameo from the surviving pioneers? The IMDB blurb suggests it'll go further than just the cloning of the IBM PC but it makes me wonder how far they can carry this story. Factually, the first episode seems reasonably accurate apart from the engineer's twin-floppy TRS-80 Model 3, making a hard-disk boot-up sound at power-on. The scene where they copy the de-soldered BIOS as 65536 individual hex numbers onto paper notepads with a pen gave me a laugh. Though, IIRC the BIOS in a 5150 was only 8K, so they'd be copying 8192 hex numbers and not 65536? It reminded me of the scene in Micro Men where Steve Furber begins soldering the wires into the prototype BBC Micro. Chris Curry: (Looking at his watch) "It won't take long, will it?" Steve: "I've done the first seven. About three thousand to go." None of those high-powered CRTs projecting their displays onto the operator's faces. YET (But there's time). Still, it's looking like a good start to what promises to be an interesting series. Edited May 21, 2014 by UKRetrogamer Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted May 21, 2014 Share Posted May 21, 2014 Despite the very minor technical inaccuracies, I enjoyed it very much. I liked it better than the "Jobs" movie, in fact. Quite looking forward to episode 2. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 Watched the first 32 minutes so far. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joey Z Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 (edited) The scene where they copy the de-soldered BIOS as 65536 individual hex numbers onto paper notepads with a pen gave me a laugh. Though, IIRC the BIOS in a 5150 was only 8K, so they'd be copying 8192 hex numbers and not 65536? no, I think it was 64K of ROM. remember, they somehow whittled the 8088's 1MB of address range down to only 640KB it had to go somewhere. Big BIOS, BASIC in ROM, video ROM, video framebuffer, and option ROMs. Edited May 22, 2014 by Joey Z Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Usotsuki Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 XT ROM is 32K of BASIC and 8K of BIOS Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted May 22, 2014 Share Posted May 22, 2014 I'm not real familiar with the PC back then. But would it have not been simpler to write a program to read the BIOS and print the values out? They do that with alot of PC's for emulation to get the system BIOS. Or did IBM somehow have the BIOS protected from this? I doubt that is the case. But then I'm not sure. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Usotsuki Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 There's no issue with just bsaving it. Nothing's hidden or banked. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BillC Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 I'm not real familiar with the PC back then. But would it have not been simpler to write a program to read the BIOS and print the values out? They do that with alot of PC's for emulation to get the system BIOS. Or did IBM somehow have the BIOS protected from this? I doubt that is the case. But then I'm not sure. If they had just copied the original PC BIOS IBM could have sued for copyright violation and had them shut down, by having programmers write a compatible replacement BIOS while never having seen the original code meant that IBM couldn't. While thBIOS they wrote did basicly the same as IBMs it wasn't covered by IBMs copyright. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 (edited) If they had just copied the original PC BIOS IBM could have sued for copyright violation and had them shut down, by having programmers write a compatible replacement BIOS while never having seen the original code meant that IBM couldn't. While thBIOS they wrote did basicly the same as IBMs it wasn't covered by IBMs copyright.You totally missed my point. By manually copying the hex codes from the BIOS they were essentially doing the same exact thing that writing a program to read and print out the BIOS values would have done. Except the method they chose took longer. They got around the copyright issue by documenting what the code did and then hiring someone who was NOT involved in the process of viewing the BIOS code and documenting it to write a NEW BIOS based on the specs (documentation) that they created. Hence they could of saved themselves alot of time by simply writing a program to read the values in the BIOS. Rather than trying to figure out which chip was the BIOS and using tools to read each address manually without any repercussions. Edited May 23, 2014 by Shannon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 (edited) It's understood that they had to reimplement the BIOS according to a spec derived from disassembly. The question surrounds the method used to obtain the content of the chip: why didn't they just dump the ROM. I had assumed programmers capable of reading the chip were perhaps beyond the guy's means. Edit: what he said. Edited May 23, 2014 by flashjazzcat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rybags Posted May 23, 2014 Author Share Posted May 23, 2014 I only watched a few minutes... found out it's supposedly only a preview and the actual first ep will be double the length. Dumping ROMs is way too easy and intuitive - it has to be remembered that anything from Hollywood has the stars performing simple computing tasks using methods that are 10 times as complex as would actually be required. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 Well no doubt the director took some "liberties" to make the story more "dramatic" both visually and emotionally. The sex scene at the beginning. The improper explanation of the HCF command. (I'd have to look that one up because it has been years but I'm pretty sure JamesD description is close). The "disapproving wife" TM. Who just happens to show up just when they finish dumping the BIOS in the most inconvenient manner ever. And several minor technical inaccuracies.. But overall it was pretty decent. Although that ex IBM guy had a certain "creepy" factor to him. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 What I liked - despite the various concessions to dramatic licence - was the fact they were prepared to avoid completely dumbing down everything. The viewer was credited with sufficient intelligence to process terms such has "hex" and "BIOS". Imbuing a scene where two men write down hexadecimal numbers with dramatic tension is not such an easy thing, I imagine, so credit to the writers for getting the balance just right. 3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shannon Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 Hex? I thought that was a curse that witches place on people.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flashjazzcat Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 Hex? I thought that was a curse that witches place on people.. You know, I'm starting to think it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almightytodd Posted May 23, 2014 Share Posted May 23, 2014 I'm glad to see the interest in this topic. ...just a little sad that my thread on this scrolled out of New Content before more than one person responded. Thanks Cobra Commander! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KLund1 Posted May 29, 2014 Share Posted May 29, 2014 How are your guys see the first episode when it has not yet aired? S1E1 is schedule for this upcoming Sunday June 1. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
almightytodd Posted May 29, 2014 Share Posted May 29, 2014 How are you guys seeing the first episode when it has not yet aired? S1E1 is schedule for this upcoming Sunday June 1. Sneak-peek preview available on the website: http://www.amctv.com/full-episodes/halt-and-catch-fire/3571290828001/i-o-full-episode Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osgeld Posted June 2, 2014 Share Posted June 2, 2014 I just watched it on tv eh, though its interesting its a shame they did something completely fictional vs something that actually happened (like compaq), but whatever its tv Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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