This review will contain spoilers, not a lot, but be warned. If you’re savvy about the Computer History, you know this series would end in 1984. And I don’t foresee a continuation, at least not with the current cast and not in the same 80’s era. For a recap, the last 2 episodes lead Joe, Gordon, Cameron and Donna to 83’s Comdex. Donna’s boss is revealed as a schemer that tricked them and built a copy-cat out of pure corporate espionage. I did find this twist a bit too much to swallow at this point, but that does happen (especially if you’re in China). Anyway, Joe rips Cameron off from the Giant and deliver a cheaper, faster IBM-PC compatible Laptop that runs MS-DOS. The Cardiff Giant (ironically, the name for a very famous USA hoax) is not vapor anymore and it hits the streets to what appears to be a good enough success. Joe seems to be actually able to finally leave his mark in history with a machine that seems to be ahead of its time, the vision of “2x faster 2x cheaper”. Or is he? Again, if you know the History, it’s not a surprise that it was the wrong way to go from the beginning, both Joe and Gordon, dismissed Moore’s Law, they almost felt it at Comdex and when Joe saw the (obvious) Macintosh demo, he knew he had failed. He finally understood the difference between incremental evolution and true disruption. Faster and Cheaper is for commodities, the way a career at IBM would make you think. So the revelation for Joe was a nice touch. That ending was doomed to happen since we started episode 1, the show set up the stage at late 82 or early 83, at the real Dallas-Fort Worth Silicon Praire (from where many really famous companies are such as AT&T, Cisco, Ericsson, Motorola, etc). They also made very sure that the show was set in a realistic way, so besides the fictional Cardiff Electric, all the other stuff actually happened. Therefore, 1984 would hit them hard with Macintosh to become the milestone of the decade in terms of innovation (even though sales were actually poor). The Cardiff Electric seemed to be an amalgam of the 82/83 real laptops Grid Compass, Gavillan SC and the Sharp PC-5000. The specs are a mix of those, the design feels more like the Grid but it ran a proprietary Grid OS. The Gavillan was more powerful (with a 8088 chip instead of Cardiff’s stated 8086) and actually ran MS-DOS. The Sharp was uglier, LCD display (albeit shorter and wider) but also ran MS-DOS. History of Laptops will go on, with incremental evolutions. Tandy releases the cult/famous TRS- 80, then we will see the Commodore-64. The 1985’s Toshiba TI100 would become the first one to be considered “mass-market”, so this puts the Cardiff Giant behind in 83. If the story continued for another episode, I speculate we would see Cardiff not going so well, maybe sold to Tandy (as did the Grid) but it would not be until the early 90’s before laptops actually become more popular. Meanwhile the real revolution would be the continued dissemination of the IBM- PC, swallowing the Apple-II market and the Era of the Desktop with a ramp up in 95 with Windows 95. The History lesson here is to actually make a point: Halt and Catch Fire, as it stands, can’t continue if the idea is to follow History more closely. The Macintosh was already shown (and the title of the episode being “1984” sums it up). The finale is actually a very cliché “Innovator’s Dilemma” stand off. The high points being that Cameron and Donna were very good female characters and the one’s with the actual innovations. Donna’s idea of the layered array motherboard and many other demonstrations of her skills in hardware were very nice touches. Cameron had the vision of “usability” in OS’s at the same time as Apple (while in a more crude, no-GUI way) was spot on and then the vision of fast networks to play games was also spot on. Having both of them working together was a good way to wrap it up, meaning that the men actually didn’t have vision, the women did. Joe is a poor version of Steve Jobs. Gordon is a poor version of Steve Wozniak. I think they made this point very clear. With all that said, Cardiff Electric will hold until maybe 1985 and shut down under Gordon (and it was great to show that even though he is an expert engineer, just technical skills are not enough to move forward, as many hipster programmers like to think), nor being irritatingly unpredictable like Joe’s pseudo-visionary posture. I think the finale made a good point of showing that off. And personally, 1984 ends the hardware startup era that has been boiling up since the late 60’s under the reigns of giants such as Gordon Moore, Andy Grove, Bob Noyce, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard, Robert Metcalfe and others. And so does the show. I don’t know if they intended to make a follow up but I don’t see AMC pursuing more, unless they shift time to the Internet era and do a Facebook-inspired software startup themed new series. This is a show that makes senses if you’re a tech aficionado but I don’t think of it as a computer era Mad Men that is actually accessible to the general population. Congratulation on the production team for making a computer TV series, that is not a comedy, that don’t make us, tech aficionados, embarrassed to watch. This was the best part of the show by far. Unfortunately that also makes it not too accessible to everybody else. imdb/title/tt3566368/
Posted on: Sun, 10 Aug 2014 06:00:45 +0000
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