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Talk:Halt and Catch Fire (TV series)

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Robertkeller (talk | contribs) at 04:56, 11 June 2014 (Technical issues with the show). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

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Series title

Halt and Catch Fire (HCF) was actually an instruction on Motorola processors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire BasementTrix (talk) 11:05, 3 April 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and as can be clearly understood from the article you mention (i.e., Halt and Catch Fire), the definition displayed at the beginning of the first episode is wildly exaggerated, to the point of being false: "HALT AND CATCH FIRE (HCF): An early computer command that sent the machine into a race condition, forcing all instructions to compete for superiority at once. Control of the computer could not be regained." Let's see: Racing, false. All instructions, false (It was basically a single instruction, when it finally did exist and was no longer just a joke, ca. 1974 (though instructions to halt or idle the machine were around in the 1950s)). Competing for superiority (as if autonomous intelligent agents), big, fat, False. Actually, even control of the computer could be regained, in only the very worst case via a hard reset, so that's false too. This Fake Historical Justification business is highly reminiscent of the fictitious explanation at the beginning of S1/E1 of Mad Men, where they tell you in white text on a black background: "MAD MEN | A term coined in the late 1950s to describe the advertising executives of Madison Avenue. They coined it." People have widely believed that false etymology. However, culture columnist Thomas Frank at Salon.com did a very thorough job of debunking AMC's artistic overreach (See this Salon article, 3rd section, 1st two paragraphs). →Of course I understand it's all just artistic license; the "HCF" definition lays out an obvious metaphor for the "race condition", forced competition, and loss of control that not the commands on any early computer could ever possibly have sent the machine into, but rather which the nature & behavior of people sent the whole IBM-compatible personal computer industry into. Which is fine, for what it is; but imho people shouldn't be misled like that, even for the sake of Art, and I'm hoping the present article will soon properly dispel that intelligence-insulting, ignorance-fostering "definition". (Okay, done venting...)--IfYouDoIfYouDon't (talk) 10:15, 5 June 2014 (UTC)[reply]

BIOS Source Code

They go through a ton of trouble to "reverse engineer" the BIOS, when IBM had actually published the 8088 source code, with comments, in their Technical Reference Manuals for PC, PC Jr, XT and AT. At minimum, rather than a hardware break-out box, they could've used the DOS DEBUG utility and disassembled starting at address F000:0000, dumping the results to a file. Other than that, the show seems close to what we did at Phoenix.

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