Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > AMC: Halt and Catch Fire
 
  • Locked thread
Sober
Nov 19, 2011

First touch: Life.
Second touch: Dead again. Forever.
I dunno if you want to stick this in the OP, but this article kinda describes what HCF is based on. Basically it's a fictional retelling of Compaq 'copying' the IBM PC.

They've got most of the details right in the pilot like how the hardware itself wasn't copyrighted, but stuff like the BIOS was, and the only way to copy it was to reverse-engineer the code and get someone who had never seen the code to basically rewrite it from the ground up.

From the Compaq co-founders they interviewed:

quote:

There were actually a few companies that went in and just started copying out of the manual and they ended up getting sued and shut down.

...

We knew there was a way to do it. We believed we could do it legally. We didn’t just assume things. We hired the best intellectual property attorneys we could find and used their strict guidance to help us do the reverse engineering very carefully.

...

What our lawyers told us was that, not only can you not use it [the copyrighted code] anybody that’s even looked at it–glanced at it–could taint the whole project. (…) We had two software people. One guy read the code and generated the functional specifications. So, it was like, reading hieroglyphics. Figuring out what it does, then writing the specification for what it does. Then, once he’s got that specification completed, he sort of hands it through a doorway or a window to another person who’s never seen IBM’s code, and he takes that spec and starts from scratch and writes our own code to be able to do the exact same function.
* # ¿ Jun 5, 2014 20:40
  • Quote
Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 03:28
  • Quote
Sober
Nov 19, 2011

First touch: Life.
Second touch: Dead again. Forever.
No, they name dropped TI (like the actual acronym) in the pilot. IIRC all those companies in Texas were well established by the time of the show. Cardiff Electric is probably fictional in the same sense as Sterling Cooper, except I don't know much about how much of SC&P going to McCann could be real whereas I think Cardiff could just a fictional analogue for Compaq.

edit: quick wiki check says TI was founded in the 30s

* # ¿ Jun 5, 2014 21:48
  • Quote
Sober
Nov 19, 2011

First touch: Life.
Second touch: Dead again. Forever.

Party Plane Jones posted:

To be honest most AMC pilots aren't exactly barnburners; aside from Walking Dead and Breaking Bad the other pilots have generally been sort of eh in the case of Rubicon to decent in the case of the Killing and Mad Men. I couldn't say what the 30 minute series pilots were like because they're all universally dogshit and I refuse to watch them. Amusingly Low Winter Sun had a fairly decent pilot but dang that series went absolutely nowhere.
There was a lot of buzz for this pilot, people rating it on the same tier as The Walking Dead ... which was odd. I was mostly excited for this show too but it wasn't really comparable at all.

* # ¿ Jun 6, 2014 21:02
  • Quote
Sober
Nov 19, 2011

First touch: Life.
Second touch: Dead again. Forever.

Josh Lyman posted:

Just to make sure I understand the BIOS situation correctly, Gordon figured out the functional spec of the IBM BIOS. In other words, he figured out its inputs/outputs that software interacts with. However, in order to replicate the functionality, they'd still have to use the IBM BIOS, so they hired Cameron to write a Cardiff version of the IBM BIOS, now that Gordon figured out what it has to do. Is that right?

What's the binder about?
From what I understood of how Compaq did it, but basically yeah. You have to write a version of the IBM BIOS that would be compatible with all the software that works on an IBM PC, except you can't copy it, and the person writing it has to have never looked at it (because it would 'corrupt' their version of the code, and be liable for them to sue them versus being coincidental). That's the only way to copy an IBM PC, by doing this insane reverse-engineering thing so they can't sue you.

What is a little weird is that no one is actually describing to Cameron what to write specifically. I would've assumed Gordon would have to do it (without talking to her, so via intermediary or something) since he actually transcribed the assembly code. Or it was all offscreen and Cameron is just angsty Sean Young-lookalike because she's trying to do the 2x speed part of the equation but she has goony as gently caress high standards.

* # ¿ Jun 18, 2014 04:10
  • Quote
Sober
Nov 19, 2011

First touch: Life.
Second touch: Dead again. Forever.
That subtle "1492" room number was where the people were watching the Mac reveal, hahaha.

* # ¿ Jul 29, 2014 06:27
  • Quote
  • Locked thread
The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > AMC: Halt and Catch Fire