As someone who lived through that era, I couldn't watch it. A deep sense of uncanny valley. The 97% that they got completely right was ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Often senslessly so. Stuff that a technical consultant would have caught in an instant.

I did rather enjoy the way that they captured the manic energy of the generation of dirtbag sales and marketing people that drove the PC industry in that era.

What it missed, I though, is that it failed to capture the breathless sense of wonder at finding yourself at the center of an event around which the entire universe was going to pivot -- something that was obviously going to change everything. That's what you lived if you worked on the technical side of the PC industry.

Tracy Kidder's book, The Soul of a New Machine, however....

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haspok 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong.

Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!

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postexitus an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It is fiction. Not meant to be a documentary. You have liberties as an artist to tell a compelling story - and boy did they do it.

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shinycode 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s very hard to capture everything in such an era. Maybe they made other choices that aligned with the fiction they were writing. It’s not a documentary. And TV shows can’t capture as much as books. The show successfully gives enough to people to haven’t lived in that era. It’s an amazing show.

	▲	latexr an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Exactly. Chernobyl is an amazing show too, even if Ulana Khomyuk is a composite character instead of a real historical person.
	▲	Nevermark 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I view any historically based show as an alternate history. Nothing good comes from expecting too much consistency with our reality. After all, if we could rewind those years, all that chaos would have all happened very differently. We canonize our own particular history too easily. Manifest destiny is not a real thing.

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walterbell 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Carl Ledbetter (one of three technical advisors) interview, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47056314#47057719

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snapetom 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I hear you. After the first season, the tech and industry was just a backdrop, and I couldn't get into because the rest of it was pretty weak.

I had the same feeling but the opposite outcome with Silicon Valley. Growing up in Palo Alto, it took me a while to figure out if I was enjoying this show because it was genuinely funny or if it was just because it hit the absurdity of the time and place so well.

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vidarh an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I've only visited Palo Alto, but I recognised way too many aspects of that series from various VC startups. Up to and including the startup I was apart of that had offices in a bedroom in a house in Atherton for a while, and the craziness around Techcrunch (which was incidentally started out of the bedroom next to "ours" in that house in Atherton).

	▲	snapetom an hour ago \| parent [-]
		There is a scene in the first season where they're all on a bus and Gilfoyle sees a middle aged woman on a bike waiting for a light. The soliloquy was so random and not even funny, but fit so well. That woman was basically every middle aged woman neighbor of mine.

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rkomorn an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I didn't like SV (the show) because it made me feel like I was going to work on Sunday night.

I guess that's to its credit: it nailed the culture.

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clydethefrog an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I remember the writers of SV actually somehow had to tone down the ridiculousness of the SV setting. See this quote from The New Yorker [0]:

>“His [Teller, working for Google] message was, ‘We don’t do stupid things here. We do things that actually are going to change the world, whether you choose to make fun of that or not.’

>Teller ended the meeting by standing up in a huff, but his attempt at a dramatic exit was marred by the fact that he was wearing Rollerblades. He wobbled to the door in silence. “Then there was this awkward moment of him fumbling with his I.D. badge, trying to get the door to open,” Kemper said. “It felt like it lasted an hour. We were all trying not to laugh. Even while it was happening, I knew we were all thinking the same thing: Can we use this?” In the end, the joke was deemed “too hacky to use on the show.”

[0] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-silicon-v...

	▲	snapetom an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I not only 100% believe this, but I'm not sure I'd be able to muster a snicker at it due to all the similarly ridiculous things I've experienced.