scowl

They've made it extra difficult because the widget they're making changes every week. First Joe was going to make a clone IBM PC like Compaq was selling. Then next week he wanted an IBM PC that runs twice as fast at half the price with no idea how to do this. This week, after apparently masturbating in front of some computers, he decided that he wanted a more portable IBM PC clone, and now they talked about making it slower than a regular IBM PC to save power and space. By the end of the season I bet he'll demand they design something with a graphical user interface like a Macintosh. At half the price of an Apple II. Is it any wonder Cardiff is having trouble getting financing with no clear product goal? This is exactly the kind of unfocused management with constantly shifting requirements that send engineers in search of sane employment and drive businesses into the ground. I know people in the industry who spent time in these companies so I want Joe to fall on his naked ass and Cardiff to end up bankrupt.

I'm having more trouble with this show, I guess because I know too much. I want the technical guys to succeed but giving us eureka moments only to have them dismissed later for mumble fritz technobabble with the genus saying, "Oh shoot, forgot is making these characters look like bumbling idiots. You can split PC boards. It would have worked. The geek babbling about "Intel or AMD" needing to reroute their dilithium crystal circuits through a flux capacitor or whatever for this to work made no sense and was just hitting my face with stupid. It's especially jarring when this is mixed with correct information like arranging chips on a PC board or the dilemma on whether or not to put a heat sink on the CPU. The drama of Cameron writing code with lipstick on a mirror is the tired cliche of the tortured genius trying to get the brilliance out their perfect minds. Nice to see her typing code into a computer for one moment. That works a lot better than writing it in lipstick. Right now I don't know what kind of widget they're trying to make. All I know is they have no chance of producing anything at this rate. I have a feeling they're going to throw us one eureka moment that quickly solves all their problems in one episode.

In 1985 I had a typewriter that had a parallel printer interface. It was quite amazing to see a typewriter typing by itself. I turned in papers that were identical to typewritten... which doesn't sound like a big deal now if you never saw the 9 pin dot matrix printouts we had back then. You had a 19 inch color monitor? When the IBM PC came out, I remember two color monitors, a 14 inch one and a 15 inch one. The 15 inch one cost almost twice as much as the 14 inch one. I got a 19 inch color monitor in the mid 1990's for $800 and it was one of the cheaper ones. One of the "game changers" of the PC is that you couldn't hook it up to your TV set which was shocking to us computer hobbyists. It was obviously a way for evil IBM to make more money.

It seems like that's what the show is aiming at with all that genius stuff Cameron scratched on her whiteboard. Yep, that stuff is gonna make a computer run twice as fast at half the price. The only thing I can remember that made IBM PCs go faster was avoiding the BIOS whenever possible.

The 5150 came with a ridiculously small built-in 5 inch monitor. I think you could plug in an external monitor but since it had to be an IBM monitor it would have cost thousands of dollars. The 5150 sort of relates to the show. That was IBM's first attempt at a "personal" computer meaning it only took up a half a desk and was connected to a (mostly empty) box the size of a small refrigerator.

I cringe whenever I think of the IBM 370 with the segmented memory architecture, then I remember that the 8088 in the IBM PC also had segmented memory. Well, at least it had a stack. The tiny monochrome monitor. My dad bought one of these for his business. The floppy drive enclosure was 90% empty space because even small computers needed to be big for IBM. Or maybe it was supposed to be a printer stand?

The show is doing a terrible job explaining its technical plot points -- lots of people are scratching their heads over this buy-ass Cameron is supposed to be building because they've never explained what it is. Open Architecture? That's gone over people's heads too. The yelling and fist fight seem like attempts to add drama to something that isn't dramatic. And we had to have the cliché scene where someone looks at a blackboard and in twenty seconds is astounded by the brilliance. Wait, it was a whiteboard. I don't remember whiteboards in common use in 1983, certainly not in the basement. Make it run twice as fast? That prompted technical nonsense like "changing the crystal"? Uh, the CPU will only run reliably at its specified speed so that made no sense. I thought maybe they were going to make a BIOS that ran twice as fast but many DOS applications didn't use the BIOS so that won't work. What the hell was that about? Could we please see Cameron typing in assembly code instead of scribbling junk on paper? The contrived drama plus the disregard for any technical accuracy is making this show hard to watch for me.

I was using the most primitive computer hardware available because I couldn't afford a real computer. I built a computer kit with a 6502 CPU and maybe 48K of RAM. I wrote code in BASIC (which came on a ROM), assembler and Forth. Since the kit came with the schematics I came up with simple hardware projects like a printer interface, a sound generator, and a real time clock. Those actually worked so I built a graphics board which was 192x368 pixels, black and white (I didn't know how color worked yet!). I even built a floppy controller from a schematic I saw in a magazine (one chip to move the head around and another to read and write the data) and got it to work. I think a five inch floppy had 40 tracks and I was able to write 8K to each one giving me 320K of data on a single-sided floppy but I didn't have a disk operating system to I just wrote on the disk label what was in each track. My two disk commands copied the data to or from RAM to a track on the floppy. I didn't know anything about Apple II's or TRS-80's or any "real" computers. I didn't understand why people just plugged their computers in and worked on them instead of tearing them apart and screwing around with their guts.

I don't grok this example. Back then there was no Microsoft Word on the IBM PC and if there had been, a common platform solved nothing. For example we had WordStar and WordPerfect, two incompatible word processing applications that ran on DOS. These were far more common on PC's than Word. That isn't true. Microsoft Word originally ran on Microsoft's own version of Unix called Xenix which I used at school at the time. Microsoft had to port it to DOS after the IBM PC came out. Through the years Microsoft proceeded to port it to just about every popular non-PC platform around including the Mac, the Atari ST, and even more versions of Unix like SCO. Microsoft fully supported the Mac platform all through the 80's even as the PC clones took over the market. Back then it wasn't common to pass around word processing documents in proprietary formats. We all sent each other boring text in boring ASCII and that continued well into the 1990's.

Does Rene's wife ever say anything that someone over six years old would say?

Yes, the yelling and threats were comical, as if the future of the free world was at stake. Back then the real people involved in these things were so laid back that they made Bill Gates seem like a explosive personality.

This was surprising initially because before that, we already had a universal platform that did these things: CP/M. Before the IBM PC, there were lots of machines that looked much like it running CP/M on slow 8080A processors with 64K of RAM with an 8 inch or 5 inch floppy disk. Many word processing machines (like those made by Wang) were really just CP/M machines running a single application. The Osborne I was the most popular CP/M machine. The Apple II even had a board that let it run CP/M. Most of the expansion boards that claimed to be compatible with the S-100 bus really were compatible so you could buy memory boards, floppy controllers, and other expensive boards and plug them in. We thought this was the open architecture of the future. Then it all fell apart. The faster and semi-compatible Z80 CPU showed up and no one wanted to release two versions of their applications. Even worse, the 5 inch floppy disk formats were different for almost every machine (there were programs to "translate" them) so distributing software to all the different machines got worse and worse. And graphics? Who needed graphics for business applications? IBM walked into this mess at the right time because Digital Research (the owner of CP/M) was arguably adding to the anarchy by porting CP/M to every new microprocessor and actually making things worse.

What do my fellow nerds think of the mundane technical details? I liked the torture of desoldering a chip off of a PC board. When I built stuff like RAM boards as a kid, occasionally I'd stupidly solder a chip in backwards and have to carefully remove the solder without destroying the board or the chip. A 512 byte static RAM chip cost about $5 if I remember right. They were going through the voltages and coming across minus five volts. I don't remember any chips in the IBM PC that used negative volts except maybe the RS-232 serial port. Going through all 64K bytes of the BIOS chip manually, flipping the switches to address every byte and then reading the value at that address was far more tedious than what they would have done which is connect the ROM to the bus of an Apple II (probably via a breadboard) and just write a program to read the contents. I believe they skipped the almost equally tedious task of typing all that data back in so they could disassemble the code. And understanding what the BIOS did wasn't trivial either but maybe they're not at that point yet. Also, was the BIOS really 64K? I don't remember any women in video arcades back then, certainly not super hot programmers!