| ▲ | IBCNU 8 hours ago |
| And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine. I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk. Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season. What's so great about it is: - mushroom theory of management works
- trust new graduates and juniors to win by not understanding the possible
- throw all the corporate bs away, just build
- competing teams (skunk-works, vs roadmap team) works
- real innovation is built by tinkerers, from the ground up, not top down as a startup weirdo in the age of AI, who pines for the golden era (as they call it the golden prarie) i highly recommend this show! |
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| ▲ | arscan 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| My father was an unnamed DG marketing executive in the book, who joked that his greatest career regret was asking Kidder to be unnamed in case the book wasn’t any good (it won Kidder the Pulitzer). I’ve been meaning to go through his old notebooks, as he took detailed notes on everything, to see if there is anything left from that era. |
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| ▲ | acomjean 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | DG = data general a “large” computer company in Westboro mass. My mom worked there doing internationaliztion. Soul of a new machine is a fantastic book. About DG going up against DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) and their Vax machines. | |
| ▲ | randrus 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I joined DG in their last days, largely due to kidders book. Also, I really liked DG/UX, for reasons I no longer recall. | |
| ▲ | IBCNU 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | amazing lore! |
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| ▲ | tptacek 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Season 1 is Soul of a New Machine-ish, but about personal computing, not minicomputers, and is set in Texas. Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas. Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA. Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA. |
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| ▲ | ai_critic 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem with it is that it is ahistorical enough in the tech that some things just don't work. The show tackles stuff about like a decade before it was actually relevant in market, and that has subtle problems that give the business stuff an uncanny-valley feel. Still a fun drama though. | | |
| ▲ | deaddodo 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Yeah, agreed. Watching it as a drama, it’s fun. Watching it with any perspective on tech history it gets a little cringy. The first season is semi-accurate if you just replace Compaq with their company. But it quickly goes off the rails. | | | |
| ▲ | hibikir 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I like the fact that it's the wrong years for the idea to succeed: Kind of like with the Newton, they are going into visionary ideas when the tech or the market isn't there. There's a lot of companies out there that fail because they go in too early to have good execution. | | |
| ▲ | Nevermark 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | So many people have been there. Working to put something together, but with gaps that are hard to close. I have been there. Even billionaires like Zuck bite off more than they can chew and flail around. For that matter, Jobs at NeXT succeeded in an unlikely way in the end. But for much of NeXT's existence it chronically couldn't get enough traction. They ended up droping the hardware. Then down purposed their OS into a developer platform to run on other OS's. So disappointing. But they did such good work, when Apple had a need, they were ready. |
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| ▲ | alexjplant 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | During my first watch of this show there were around eleventy kabillion times that I reflexively shouted "that's not how that worked!" at the TV (and I'm a 90s kid with cursory retrocomputing knowledge). I say "reflexively" because I wasn't actually mad at these technical inaccuracies - they were largely in service of a good plot and weren't "SVU" or "CSI" levels of ridiculous. So yes, those C64s were running software 5-10 years ahead of their time because the writers felt like it and were able to get away with such. |
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| ▲ | vel0city 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Season 1 feels like its connecting back to Compaq, which made a competitor to IBM's PC platform. Founded by previous TI employees, reverse engineered IBM's BIOS, etc. |
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| ▲ | unmole 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine. I've only watched the first season and really don't see the link to Soul of a New Machine. |
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| ▲ | LambdaComplex 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| You just reminded me that I got about halfway through Soul of a New Machine. Maybe I'll pick it back up this week. |
