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Comment by cknoxrun | Hacker News Reader

I would highly suggest checking out Halt and Catch Fire. It's a period piece, but I think it captures the spirit of Northern California. The first 2 seasons are in Texas before they jump ship to San Francisco.

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H&CF is a great series and switches gears every season. The final season has some of the most beautifully written and acted character moments I've ever seen on TV. I finished it almost aching for the characters on the show and I rarely ever have a strong reaction to TV.

ditto. Its starts off with a young ex-IBM executive trying to build the first IBM compatible machine and everything that goes with launching the new product. Later seasons go into things like server farms, early gaming, and social networking.

really underrated show.

I really like the historical/tech story lines but the soap-opera interpersonal relationships wrecked it for me. The whole "broken imperfection" thing often goes to far and really detracts from the story.

You might like this documentary on the origins of National Semiconductor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbRZGDV-ws

I agree. It feels like it's trying to be a film festival movie about a tumultuous relationship and "complicated" hero/heroine that just has the beginning of the personal computer age as a backdrop.

Based on the founding of Compaq

It also draws from the book 'Soul of a New Machine' about Data General's a few years before Compaq.

The 'adventure addiction' scene, for example.

I really enjoyed that series. Early in my career I spent 6 months in Dallas in the early 80s, same space-time as the first 2 seasons. They captured working in a "tech" company in Dallas perfectly.

I love how H&CF talked about innovations of the 80s-90s that we think of as revolutions now that they have taken off: online games, social network, streaming, time-sharing/cloud computing.

I thought that show went off the rails when spoiler the dude set the van full of hardware on fire

That's at the end of the first season, which was weaker than the subsequent ones, really.

Likewise, it's a great series, very well written, sad to see it so unknown and underrated...

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