| ▲ | tptacek 8 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | 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. |
