S01.E01: I/O

[Stinger97]

The 1980s computing boom through the eyes of a visionary, an engineer and a prodigy as they chart the changing culture in Texas' Silicon Prairie.

 

Sneak Preview: 

• Episode 1

[crashdown]

Just caught the pilot.  I love this show so much that it scares the shit out of me!

[dorakpasa]

Just watched the pilot.  Very good.  Plus one of the co-creators, writers, producers is the son of a college classmate and friend.

[Armchair Critic]

The actors who played the husband and wife also played husband and wife in Argo.

[ApathyMonger]

The pilot was decent, but I want to watch another few episodes before I make up my mind. It's hard to tell what the show will be like week-to-week.

[hardy har]

I didn't blow me away or anything, but I do think it seems to have laid the ground work for potential awesomeness. I'm in.

[bosawks]

Do you think, wherever she is, Mary Stuart Masterson took one look at the character of Cameron and immediately started humming "Some Kind of Wonderful"?

[AimingforYoko]

Nice music choices, I especially liked "The Magnificent Seven" by The Clash for Cameron's first day at Cardiff.

[Tara Ariano]

I wrote about why I'm giving the show the benefit of the doubt even though so far it's a little boring.

[Auntie Anxiety]

I read a number of reviews about this show, all of them good.  So I was expecting the worst (because the critics usually have pretty low standards), but the pilot actually delivered.  I'll be watching next week.  

[geekamonggeeks]

I actually liked it quite a bit. I've been wanting to catch this show when I first heard it about it several weeks ago, for two reasons; to fill in the void left by Mad Men's mid-season finale, and because it's about time I got involved in shows beyond trashy, guilty-pleasure reality T.V. I have to admit that I didn't understand some of the jargon they used, so I'll probably have to re-watch it. But I have a feeling I'll be watching every Sunday, until if and when it goes south.

[Peace 47]

For me, it cleared the admittedly low bar of being quite a bit better than everything else that AMC tries to wedge into that extra Sunday night slot.  And I have a soft spot for Lee Pace.  But I couldn't help but think a few times that I would rather watch a show about that Texas Instruments engineer wife navigating a male-dominated field in the early 1980s with 2 kids and a depressed husband over watching all that was going on at Cardiff.  Still, as you said in your article, Tara, it's a relatively unexplored era in our history, and there's potentially an interesting story to unfold here.

 

That sex scene between "Always be Closing"-Lite and Computer Grrrrl was a little annoying in that it seemed to be a blatant attempt at selling sex early on in the program to keep the audience from switching off, but I know that they do what they have to do.

[IchabodCranium]

I'd be super interested in a show about how computers went from these mysterious room sized machines that inspired people to cut off their nipples to the PCs that everyone was dying to own in the 80s. I'd be even more interested in a show about the creation of the internet. I'm less interested in a show that is about three upstarts who are part of an already established electronics company going into the PC clone business. It's like the show skipped over the most interesting parts of the story.  I want to see the show about the people who create something new. If Watts, Yuppie Lee Pace and Beard with Terrible Glasses are building a computer that is actually going to be revolutionary, I wanted to get some sense of what was going to be different or better about it. What was so cool about Beard's Symphonic computer and why didn't it work? Talking about chips and RAM isn't as inherently interesting or relatable as Mad Men made advertising. But I'm still willing to give it a chance because it's different from everything else and, honestly, I decided to give it a second episode when I realized that Beard's wife wasn't just the standard prestige cable Killjoy Wife who is dragging the Great Man down but is also a software engineer. It's nice to see tech portrayed as an area in which women can excel, especially after reading an editorial today that pointed out that there were more women CS majors in the early 1980s than now.

[green]

I'd be super interested in a show about how computers went from these mysterious room sized machines that inspired people to cut off their nipples to the PCs that everyone was dying to own in the 80s. I'd be even more interested in a show about the creation of the internet. I'm less interested in a show that is about three upstarts who are part of an already established electronics company going into the PC clone business. It's like the show skipped over the most interesting parts of the story.  I want to see the show about the people who create something new. If Watts, Yuppie Lee Pace and Beard with Terrible Glasses are building a computer that is actually going to be revolutionary, I wanted to get some sense of what was going to be different or better about it. What was so cool about Beard's Symphonic computer and why didn't it work? Talking about chips and RAM isn't as inherently interesting or relatable as Mad Men made advertising. But I'm still willing to give it a chance because it's different from everything else and, honestly, I decided to give it a second episode when I realized that Beard's wife wasn't just the standard prestige cable Killjoy Wife who is dragging the Great Man down but is also a software engineer. It's nice to see tech portrayed as an area in which women can excel, especially after reading an editorial today that pointed out that there were more women CS majors in the early 1980s than now.

 

I don't think the show is presenting that part I bolded clear enough for sure.  What backward engineering IBM's PC did was let the rest of us 99%ers own computers finally.  The IBM and Apple monopoly of business users and rich guys was broken wide open when Compaq put out the first PC clone and tons of other companies rushed in to jump aboard and all the competition drove down prices radically. 

 

And thanks to Bill Gates retaining control of the OS he basically "rented" to IBM, all the tons of those PC clone machines that followed got to use the same OS system (old DOS and later Windows) which allowed all the programs from word processing programs to games to run on ALL the various clone PCs which was totally revolutionary.  Suddenly there was a universal platform and suddenly the whole world could afford these computers that could basically talk to each other now (via floppy disks of course) no matter their brand name.  Innovation flourished and the ground was fertile for a better way to share information between all these compatible computers which set the stage for the internet.

 

These three people ushered in the true computer age which, up until that time, had been only for corporations and rich geeks. The endless shows about Apple stealing Xerox's stuff and starting the personal computer era was all prelude to this breakout moment when suddenly the "people" got put into the "personal" computer age thanks to breaking the monopoly stranglehold IBM and Apple had over everyone.  And this part of the story has always been totally undertold when it is probably the most pivotal moment of the computer age. 

 

I just don't thing the exposition and set-up explained it or set it up very well.  The program assumes everyone is up to speed on the whole PC clone story and how it came about and why it was so important and how it lead to everything else and nothing could be further from the truth.

[IchabodCranium]

Thank you for explaining that, Green. If there had been a Don Draper style pitch that clearly laid out everything you wrote, I would have understood how important and risky what they are doing is. When they mentioned all of the other brands that were already on the market, it was unclear that those brands didn't have a Windows OS.  Adding to my confusion was my memory that my family's first computer was an IBM and we were far from wealthy. However, that was way later than this show was set, so IBM's prices would have already been driven down by the competition. 

[Pollock]

But I couldn't help but think a few times that I would rather watch a show about that Texas Instruments engineer wife navigating a male-dominated field in the early 1980s with 2 kids and a depressed husband over watching all that was going on at Cardiff.

 

That would be awesome as a counterpart. Maybe not a show in itself but they should include an episode, as they did in the Big C when we got an episode about the mother and her day.

 

I loved the pilot. I understand nothing about "inside the computers" so the lingo flew right above my head where the question marks floated like crazy but I didn't care. The rythm was good, I liked all the characters even if the geek girl is on the dangerous path of yet another Lisbeth Salander minus the dark hair.

Lee Pace was awesome, his return as a lead long overdue so I'm happy.

 

Green, thank you for explaining basically the premise of the show so perfectly. I was on my way to wikipedia to read about PC clone story because the show made me wonder why it was so important and you spared me the trip ! 

[thuganomics85]

I thought it was good enough to keep watching, even though it felt like at times it was trying to copy it's more well-known AMC shows. Mainly, Joe reminded me way too much of Don Draper, and Gordon was almost like Walter White before he "broke bad."

 

But I thought it picked up as the episode went on, and I'm curious to see where it is going now.  And the actors playing the big three are good.  I'm especially curious about Cameron/Mackenzie Davis, who I think is a relative newcomer, but I thought she held her own with the more established Lee Pace and Scoot McNairy.  Speaking of Scoot, I totally am getting a kick out of him and Kerry Bishe playing a married couple again, like they did in Argo.

 

Loved the music.

Edited June 2, 2014 by thuganomics85

[Jamoche]

I had an Apple ][ in 1980, and I would never have considered that time period to be "IBM and Apple had a monopoly". IBM had a monopoly in the business market. Apple was the little upstart. (TRS-80 was called the "Trash-80" for a reason.) There were non-IBM computers that were small enough that we'd consider them "personal" and they were *not* affordable to the typical family, not the way Apples were.

[GaT]

Hmm. not sure how I feel about it, I was honestly kind of bored, especially when they were talking computers. I'll give it another episode or 2, & then see how I feel.

[PRgal]

I'm also going to give it another few episodes.  Also, the show being in set in 1983 means we're probably less than a year away from this ad, which will likely get some sort of mention, probably towards the end of the season.  These guys SHOULD know something that it's...coming...

[Jordan Baker]

I wasn't blown away by the pilot (the way I was with "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad"), but I was intrigued enough to stick with the show.

 

My two favorite moments:

 

• After the silver-tongued sales pitch, the engineer mentions the "free install". Not only is it funny in constrast to all that has come before it, but it is so typical of the way many techies use "install" as a noun.
   
• The army of lawyers arriving to do battle. All in their dark suits.

 

One thing that's not clear to me, though. Is Cardiff supposed to be based on a real company?

[Abstract]

Geek girl is so anachronistic that she takes me out of the show entirely. You would never see a character like that in The Americans.

Other than that, I am perfectly willing to watch every week out of desperation.

[Charlotte Vale]

I love Lee Pace and I love 1983 (gosh did I have fun in the early '80s--1980s, I mean). But this was slow going.

 

The McGuffin has to be a lot more interesting, and they have to "1983 it up" a bit more. Spend more money on some of the great tunes of that year, go a little more over the top with the hair and costumes. One reason Mad Men was such a hit from the first was that they 1960'd us over the head with a baseball bat.

 

But it's good enough to keep me going for now . . .

[ABay]

Meh. I'll give it another episode and hope it improves but I was mostly bored. Maybe part of the problem is that I remember the 1980s too clearly and don't feel the safety of historical distance that I do about the 60s and 70s.

[dubbel zout]

I couldn't help but think a few times that I would rather watch a show about that Texas Instruments engineer wife navigating a male-dominated field in the early 1980s with 2 kids and a depressed husband over watching all that was going on at Cardiff.

 

I know. When she asked her husband to look at the Speak and Spell and he said it was her department, I thought, "Whoa, here's the more interesting partner in this marriage."

 

Geek girl is so anachronistic that she takes me out of the show entirely.

 

I raised an eyebrow at her, too.

 

This show sort of feels like a (very) poor man's second cousin to the late, very lamented Rubicon. I'll give HaCF a few more episodes, but they need to ratchet up the suspense or something to keep me interested. Simply reverse-engineering an IBM computer isn't enough to hang the show on. Here's hoping the show can take that somewhere more fruitful.

[Boton]

At least one nitpick from the episode:  geek girl mentioned that if this experiment fails she'll be "repairing VCRs for $3.25 an hour."  Assuming she is trying to reference minimum wage, the minimum wage was never $3.25.  It went to $3.35 in 1981 and stayed there for several years.  My first job paid $3.35 an hour; I saved up and bought a boom box.  :-)

[green]

 

One thing that's not clear to me, though. Is Cardiff supposed to be based on a real company?

 

To quote wikipedia: "The series is set in the early 1980s and depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution."  So no Cardiff was not a real company and this is a fictional "riff" off factional happenings with fictional characters.  Which is too bad because the factual happening are interesting enough in their own right.

 

The first reverse engineering of IBM's PC to both work and stand up legally was by Compaq.  To quote a short wikipedia excerpt again:

 

"Compaq Computer Corporation was a company founded in 1982, that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the first company to legally reverse-engineer the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s before being overtaken by Dell in 2001.  ....

 

"Compaq was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, three senior managers from semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments. The three of them had left due to lack of faith and loss of confidence in TI's management, and initially considered but ultimately decided against starting a chain of Mexican restaurants. Each invested $1,000 to form the company ..."

 

I would so have liked the almost Mexican restaurant chain storyline instead of the soap opera stuff in this version.

 

Also note the lack of women in the real version.  In 1982 there were almost no women in the computer industry and according to a recent report I saw that aired on the PBS Newshour where Google was the first tech company ever to release gender stats a week or so ago, it remains a very young, largely white though somewhat Asian as well male bastion.  The women and Afro-Americans and Hispanics in the demographics are way lower then other industries by far.  It is hard to imagine a hot shot young engineer being a female back then let alone a senior software developer at Texas Instruments.  But drama works better with two genders I guess.

 

But the "culture" of women getting into this field was far far worse then and it is still poor now.  The young geek laden upstart companies aren't entirely to blame since women then were still being raised to assume math and technology was a "man's world."  So neither the men nor the women thought outside the box much unfortunately.

 

A person I know who was at a small but rather good two year technology college back then that offered computer and electronics technology associate degrees totally transferable to a four year program told me that in the early 80's they had classes of appox 70 students with a lone token female in each class topping off at 3 females in a mid-80's class.  And they said they did try to encourage/recruit females but none were applying back then.

Edited June 2, 2014 by green

[Jamoche]

The comments I've been seeing with that Google report is that there are fewer women entering tech now than there were in the 80s. I don't know about now, but I was not the only woman in my CS classes. It wasn't 3 out of 70, more like 3 out of 20. Still not fantastic, of course.

[magdalene]

I really liked the music and the three main actors are interesting but I only understood how important these three people are once I read about it here. The pilot should have made that clear to me and it did not.

[PRgal]

To quote wikipedia: "The series is set in the early 1980s and depicts a fictionalized insider's view of the personal computer revolution."  So no Cardiff was not a real company and this is a fictional "riff" off factional happenings with fictional characters.  Which is too bad because the factual happening are interesting enough in their own right.

 

The first reverse engineering of IBM's PC to both work and stand up legally was by Compaq.  To quote a short wikipedia excerpt again:

 

"Compaq Computer Corporation was a company founded in 1982, that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced some of the first IBM PC compatible computers, being the first company to legally reverse-engineer the IBM Personal Computer. It rose to become the largest supplier of PC systems during the 1990s before being overtaken by Dell in 2001.  ....

 

"Compaq was founded in February 1982 by Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto, three senior managers from semiconductor manufacturer Texas Instruments. The three of them had left due to lack of faith and loss of confidence in TI's management, and initially considered but ultimately decided against starting a chain of Mexican restaurants. Each invested $1,000 to form the company ..."

 

I would so have liked the almost Mexican restaurant chain storyline instead of the soap opera stuff in this version.

 

Also note the lack of women in the real version.  In 1982 there were almost no women in the computer industry and according to a recent report I saw that aired on the PBS Newshour where Google was the first tech company ever to release gender stats a week or so ago, it remains a very young, largely white though somewhat Asian as well male bastion.  The women and Afro-Americans and Hispanics in the demographics are way lower then other industries by far.  It is hard to imagine a hot shot young engineer being a female back then let alone a senior software developer at Texas Instruments.  But drama works better with two genders I guess.

 

But the "culture" of women getting into this field was far far worse then and it is still poor now.  The young geek laden upstart companies aren't entirely to blame since women then were still being raised to assume math and technology was a "man's world."  So neither the men nor the women thought outside the box much unfortunately.

 

A person I know who was at a small but rather good two year technology college back then that offered computer and electronics technology associate degrees totally transferable to a four year program told me that in the early 80's they had classes of appox 70 students with a lone token female in each class topping off at 3 females in a mid-80's class.  And they said they did try to encourage/recruit females but none were applying back then.

 

My mom was in IT, but she also didn't work for an IT firm (she worked for a government-controlled operation).  She and another woman were pretty much the only women on the team (there might have been another, but I am not sure).  She never talked about the lack of women in the industry, only that it didn't seem as bad as how others seem to portray it.  She also joked about how she was a "double minority," being Asian AND female.  Of course, working in IT for the government is a different ballgame in terms of demographics.  I learned A LOT about tech while she was working there (she left when I was 12 because my dad was transferred to another country.  She probably could have been C-level had she stayed.  Not sure of her title when she resigned, but it was likely along the lines of director). 

[car54]

I loved it.   I was in college about this time and my computer experience was with punch cards and a main-frame that was bigger than my apartment.   I remember getting our first computers at work after I graduated , and I was a DOS girl from day one until just a few years ago :).

 

I would like to see more of the 80's stuff a la Mad Men and the 60's but it was a good start, and I love anything Lee Pace is in.   

[Princess Sparkle]

I was confused about one thing - did I miss a line about why Gordon was so against hiring Cameron? He said "NO" pretty emphatically upon meeting her, and it can't be because of her sleeping with Joe (because he didn't know that yet), and it can't be because he's opposed to women in the field, since his wife is an engineer. Was it her age? Cameron has the last name of "Howe" and "Clark" on imdb, so I thought she was going to be related to him and that's why he didn't want to work with her, but that never came up. Maybe they were originally going to be related and they dropped that plot point, but left in his initial "no way!"?

I got a little bored at times, but I'm willing to give it another episode or two for me to get into it.

Edited June 3, 2014 by Princess Sparkle

[Trini]

That sex scene between "Always be Closing"-Lite and Computer Grrrrl was a little annoying in that it seemed to be a blatant attempt at selling sex early on in the program to keep the audience from switching off, but I know that they do what they have to do.

This was the One Thing that turned me off. It was completely unnecessary, seemed out of place, and yeah-- probably only there because "we're on cable and we need to sex this up".

It was alright, and I didn't mind the slow (for now) pace or tech jargon.

[attica]

I was expecting to not like this, but I did. Good pacing (good Pace-ing, heh), smart edits, and a kernel of an interesting story. I have a burgeoning weak spot for Cardiff's SVP, who is playing the 'whoa, I shouldn't be in over my head but maybe I... am?' bravado with more subtlety than I'd expect.

 

Not a stem-girl myself, but I ran in engineers' circles for a while in the early 80s, and I remember the way they spoke to each other, showing disdain for last week's programming code in the jargon-iest way possible. Which I feel like H&CF is capturing. So far. I'll keep up for a while.

[Jolie]

I almost gave up within the first ten minutes because I was pretty bored. It's certainly no Mad Men, but I am glad I stuck with it because I ended up liking it enough to be looking forward to the next episode.

 

One of my main problems is that I don't find any Joe, Gordan or Cameron likeable at this point. In fact, Joe is the kind of guy I'd want to kick in the nuts. It's hard to root for characters if you don't particulary care if they succeed or not. When the dark-suited IBM legal team entered, I was "go get em". I'm pretty sure that wasn't the point.

[scowl]

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!

[scowl]

 

Suddenly there was a universal platform and suddenly the whole world could afford these computers that could basically talk to each other now (via floppy disks of course) no matter their brand name.  Innovation flourished and the ground was fertile for a better way to share information between all these compatible computers which set the stage for the internet.

 

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.

[annlaw78]

 

Do you think, wherever she is, Mary Stuart Masterson took one look at the character of Cameron and immediately started humming "Some Kind of Wonderful"?

Yes!

 

As to demographics of women-in-the-field in the 1980s, I'll say that there were no women in my year or the year below me (early 2000s) at my university in the electrical engineering program.  A couple started, but switched to computer science or other majors.  EE is a really hard degree path with a high attrition-rate, and a lot of people end up switching out of it (a lot of guys, not just women). 

 

Can someone explain to me what Joe's master plan is?  Because it sounded like he called up his old boss at IBM, said "hey, Cardiff Electronics just reverse-engineered your BIOS, bye!", and then had some elaborate plan ready to set into motion to avert legal catastrophe... but I'm not sure how his plan does that.  It doesn't make sense. 

Edited June 3, 2014 by annlaw78

[DrivingSideways]

Surprised to see so many raves about this show here.  I wanted to love it, but it was just sooooo cornball to me.  Every conversation between the two male leads was so dramatic and brimming with emotion.  It just didn't seem realistic.  And the super hot rocker girl smartass techie.  Her voice really irritates me, she reminded me a bit too much of Miley Cyrus crossed with the Legend of Billie Jean.

[Trini]

Ha! I wanted to bring up the Billie Jean haircut (but it's not actually the Billie Jean haircut).

[John R]

Reading the reviews made me realize that my love for the pilot was grounded in my understanding of how important the successful (from a legal and business perspective) reverse engineering of the IBM PC ROM-BIOS was for the entire future of technology and, really, society.  It was the first important open network standard and without it, it's inconceivable the the Internet (another open protocol) would have become the dominant network standard.  I lived through it all, played a small part in it, and now teach a class called "Technology and Society."  In particular, it's hard to imagine how crazy it was in 1983 to go up against IBM.  I thought the last scene, with the descending hordes of IBM folks, nailed that.  But I thinks it's a problem that the show did not do a better job of explaining that.  (For example, Gordon's article in Byte Magazine (which I read avidly) is on the future of open computer architecture.  I could see how that might slide by some folks.)

 

Anyway, I hope this show lives up to its potential.

[Snowprince]

I liked it overall. It's a pilot and pilots are by nature a little rough around the edges, so I'll give it a few more episodes to make a final determination as to if I'll stick with it. So far, so good.  

[mousewithachainsaw]

The comments I've been seeing with that Google report is that there are fewer women entering tech now than there were in the 80s. I don't know about now, but I was not the only woman in my CS classes. It wasn't 3 out of 70, more like 3 out of 20. Still not fantastic, of course.

Interesting. I wonder then what's preventing more women from entering. Are men just jumping at the opportunities like hot cakes and taking most of them? Where before maybe it wasn't seen as something lucrative or trendy as it is now.

[dubbel zout]

I thought the last scene, with the descending hordes of IBM folks, nailed that.

 

I kind of rolled my eyes at that—it's a common dramatic trope. Oh, look, the big bads are trying to intimidate the poor scrappy underdogs. I also kind of wanted to slap Joe. WTF did he expect? He poked the bear, and the bear is fighting back.

[Dowel Jones]

 

I was confused about one thing - did I miss a line about why Gordon was so against hiring Cameron?

I thought that it was mostly his reaction to her anti-everything attitude.  He expects engineers to be button down personalities, not wild and crazy.  Just my thoughts.  Of course, as the series progresses, she will win his grudging respect, etc.   If the show follows the standard plot line, anyway.

 

My favorite moment:  The garage door opening, and Gordon exclaiming, "You said you wouldn't be home until Monday."  And his wife replying, "This IS Monday".  More coffee, Gordon.

[renatae]

I'd be super interested in a show about how computers went from these mysterious room sized machines that inspired people to cut off their nipples to the PCs that everyone was dying to own in the 80s. I'd be even more interested in a show about the creation of the internet. I'm less interested in a show that is about three upstarts who are part of an already established electronics company going into the PC clone business. It's like the show skipped over the most interesting parts of the story.  I want to see the show about the people who create something new. If Watts, Yuppie Lee Pace and Beard with Terrible Glasses are building a computer that is actually going to be revolutionary, I wanted to get some sense of what was going to be different or better about it. What was so cool about Beard's Symphonic computer and why didn't it work? Talking about chips and RAM isn't as inherently interesting or relatable as Mad Men made advertising. But I'm still willing to give it a chance because it's different from everything else and, honestly, I decided to give it a second episode when I realized that Beard's wife wasn't just the standard prestige cable Killjoy Wife who is dragging the Great Man down but is also a software engineer. It's nice to see tech portrayed as an area in which women can excel, especially after reading an editorial today that pointed out that there were more women CS majors in the early 1980s than now.

 

 

Ahh, I was wondering about Gordon's wife. The only thing I caught about her occupation was that she worked for the company which made Speak N Spell (which I had forgotten was Texas Instruments) and that she had worked with her hubby on the Symphonic. Intriguing that she thought it was such a failure and he thought it was the greatest thing he'd ever done. I actually thought her a huge Killjoy until she finally told him it was OK as long as he was still a "partner" in the family. I, too, wanted to know more about what the Symphonic was all about.

 

When Lee Pace was giving his spiel to the clients, all I could think was, "You're no Don Draper." Too much of an obvious hot shot and too sleek by far. So instead of satisfying my Mad Men craving, it made me miss it more. I do like Lee Pace, but I'm not very fond of his character so far. The first scenes pretty much turned me off, including the obligatory sex scene with the obligatory smart ass.

 

I admit I kept falling asleep and particularly toward the end, which I had to rewatch several times, but I didn't get why IBM would be less angry (or have less recourse) if the inside knowledge was being used for actual development of a new product. I must have totally misunderstood what I was hearing.

 

Going to give it another chance, but am not yet sure it will be worth the effort for me.

I don't think the show is presenting that part I bolded clear enough for sure.  What backward engineering IBM's PC did was let the rest of us 99%ers own computers finally.  The IBM and Apple monopoly of business users and rich guys was broken wide open when Compaq put out the first PC clone and tons of other companies rushed in to jump aboard and all the competition drove down prices radically. 

 

And thanks to Bill Gates retaining control of the OS he basically "rented" to IBM, all the tons of those PC clone machines that followed got to use the same OS system (old DOS and later Windows) which allowed all the programs from word processing programs to games to run on ALL the various clone PCs which was totally revolutionary.  Suddenly there was a universal platform and suddenly the whole world could afford these computers that could basically talk to each other now (via floppy disks of course) no matter their brand name.  Innovation flourished and the ground was fertile for a better way to share information between all these compatible computers which set the stage for the internet.

 

These three people ushered in the true computer age which, up until that time, had been only for corporations and rich geeks. The endless shows about Apple stealing Xerox's stuff and starting the personal computer era was all prelude to this breakout moment when suddenly the "people" got put into the "personal" computer age thanks to breaking the monopoly stranglehold IBM and Apple had over everyone.  And this part of the story has always been totally undertold when it is probably the most pivotal moment of the computer age. 

 

I just don't thing the exposition and set-up explained it or set it up very well.  The program assumes everyone is up to speed on the whole PC clone story and how it came about and why it was so important and how it lead to everything else and nothing could be further from the truth.

 

 

I agree, this wasn't set up terrifically well, and reading your recap of the era makes me want to stand up and cheer the heroes of the time, who brought the computer age into our homes and every day lives. Yay!!!

 

However, I am a little confused, since both Microsoft and Apple, among others, were mentioned, by Geek Girl I think, the diversification had already begun, so I'm not sure how the new collaboration is supposed to be cutting edge.

Edited June 4, 2014 by renatae

[Whimsy]

Do you think, wherever she is, Mary Stuart Masterson took one look at the character of Cameron and immediately started humming "Some Kind of Wonderful"?

 

THIS.  Every single time I saw the commercials that's all I could think of.  I thought they would reference it somehow, since it's such an obvious rip-off of the character, but then they said nothing.  I really don't like her character.

 

I do like Lee Pace, but I'm not very fond of his character so far.

 

 

I don't like Lee Pace- I LOOOOOOVE Lee Pace.  I've been a huge fan of his since Wonderfalls.  I've watched pretty much everything he's done since then (The Fall is amazing).  Of course, also loved Pushing Daisies.  So, I HAD to watch this no matter what.  That said, not loving his character but I don't think we're supposed to, so I'm ok with that for now.  I hope he humanizes himself somewhere along the way. 

 

I also am glad for green's explanation above, too, because I didn't get ANY of that from the pilot but it will help me understand more as I continue to watch.

[renatae]

Yes!

 

As to demographics of women-in-the-field in the 1980s, I'll say that there were no women in my year or the year below me (early 2000s) at my university in the electrical engineering program.  A couple started, but switched to computer science or other majors.  EE is a really hard degree path with a high attrition-rate, and a lot of people end up switching out of it (a lot of guys, not just women). 

 

Can someone explain to me what Joe's master plan is?  Because it sounded like he called up his old boss at IBM, said "hey, Cardiff Electronics just reverse-engineered your BIOS, bye!", and then had some elaborate plan ready to set into motion to avert legal catastrophe... but I'm not sure how his plan does that.  It doesn't make sense. 

 

Color me confused as well!!

 

I'm enjoying posters' shares of their experiences with computing of the era. I had a big hole in my "education." In the mid 60's, I left school for a time and worked for a production company which had one of the old room-sized computers complete with deafening dot matrix printer and punch cards. Almost was sent to punch card school, but the day I was to begin, I had a terrific case of bronchitis in the dead of winter and my mom refused to let me go to work that day. The boss was hacked and my window of opportunity was gone. I later returned to school and became a health care professional. My sole experience during those years was greedily reading articles about how PC's would soon be affordable to all and everyone would have a home computer. In the meantime, my son graduated high school and earned the computing award for his class and went on into electrical engineering. Unfortunately, I did not get much second-hand from him as it was hard to translate what he was telling me into anything I could really grasp. Home computing didn't become a reality for me until 1995, when I enrolled in a distance-learning course about computers, which included our first PC. At last!

[scowl]

 

Surprised to see so many raves about this show here.  I wanted to love it, but it was just sooooo cornball to me.  Every conversation between the two male leads was so dramatic and brimming with emotion.  It just didn't seem realistic.

 

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.

[renatae]

THIS.  Every single time I saw the commercials that's all I could think of.  I thought they would reference it somehow, since it's such an obvious rip-off of the character, but then they said nothing.  I really don't like her character.

 

 

I don't like Lee Pace- I LOOOOOOVE Lee Pace.  I've been a huge fan of his since Wonderfalls.  I've watched pretty much everything he's done since then (The Fall is amazing).  Of course, also loved Pushing Daisies.  So, I HAD to watch this no matter what.  That said, not loving his character but I don't think we're supposed to, so I'm ok with that for now.  I hope he humanizes himself somewhere along the way. 

 

I also am glad for green's explanation above, too, because I didn't get ANY of that from the pilot but it will help me understand more as I continue to watch.

 

I'm hoping Lee Pace's character becomes more likeable as well. I don't really like not liking him. :) I enjoyed him so much in Pushing Daisies and just about everything else I've seen him in. I find Geek Girl obnoxious, too. I'm always less than impressed by plot lines which rely heavily upon characters trying to one up each other with their cleverness. Ho hum. To me, it just seems like it's a vehicle for the writers to patently show themselves off, and falls flat.