yeah. thanks.
i have a feeling HCF will have a lot of bogus details.. like they're definition of Halt and Catch Fire, and character Gordon Clark article "The Future of Open Architecture".. the Byte magazine cover is even bogus. lol..
maybe someone will prove me wrong.
None of this is purely fictitious. There is a lot of creative license but everything is loosely based on very real events and ideas.
Firstly, the HCF (Halt Catch Fire) command was very real. It didn't actually do anything. It was a novelty for other developers to play with the command-line interface. There were lots of these kinds of commands in those days in command-lines much like the forerunner to the modern-day easter egg. Another favorite from the era was "EJECT PROGRAMMER" for example. These commands didn't actually do anything other than display some kind of amusing message on the screen usually in a never-ending loop that was very easy to "break" out of.
As for reverse engineering the IBM BIOS chip, this is clearly inspired by the founding of the company that came to become COMPAQ, widely regarded as the company that started the PC clone industry and defended its actions under the auspices of a philosophy of interoperable computing later dubbed as Open Architecture. It SEEMS totally bogus because all the key players have fictitious names instead of their real names and yet they very specifically mention IBM and TI.
Being only one episode in so far, I'm not sure how much creative license they will use and how much the dramatized version will deviate from real events but actually so far this is tracking rather well with the story of COMPAQ which has a VERY sorted and equally very dramatic history that would definitely make for good TV if done right.
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