![]() Gordon is floundering in his life, he, along with his wife Donna, who once had the passion of PC hardware development and the potential of computers, but who now feels that the security of a job to support the family is more important despite his generally despondent state because of that job. Despite their less than productive first meeting, Joe searches out Gordon Clark, a lowly engineer at Cardiff Electric. What Cardiff Electric is unaware of is that Joe has been MIA for the past year, his whereabouts or doings which no one knows. Confident Joe MacMillan, a key player in the introduction of the IBM PC, has just been offered a job as a salesman for Cardiff Electric, a systems software company that has no interest in the development of PCs to compete against IBM. And he slips into the shadows once more.Search Halt and Catch Fire (2014–2017): Season 1, Episode 1 - I/O - full transcriptĭallas, Texas, 1983. In the final scene we learn that Joe’s Sputnik and football story is bunk. We’d found a motive maybe Joe really is moved by technical progress, by a desire to see through the logic of Moore’s Law. “We’re all unreasonable people and progressĭepends on our changing the world to fit us, mot the other way around,” he preaches.Ĭorny Joe got me at the end. Now he carries the scars of his misunderstood youth - and in Gordon and Cameron, he’s finally found two sympathetic souls. On the night of the greatest game ever played, his merciless classmatesĬhased him off a roof. Joe confesses that when he was a kid he cared about Sputnik, not football. This sets off an elaborate story in which Joe oozes geeky zeal. After Joe and Gordon scuffle, Joe’s shirt is conveniently ripped off, baring a torso covered in scars. This gets us to the penultimate scene, a three-way showdown of fisticuffs between Joe, Gordon and Cameron. He looks wounded by the idea that he doesn’t really care about what he’s building after all. But his face sinks when Cameron laughs off his passion as insincere. A computer that’s faster than IBM’s will let people accomplish more a computer that’s cheaper willīe used by more people. Joe makes a stab at explaining his rationale, and for a moment he looks taken with real passion. What other industry keeps improving its product As Gordon points out, when most products get better, they don’t also get cheaper. That serves to highlight the economic gall that animates the computer industry. In another scene, Joe outlines for Gordon and Cameron the machine he wants to build - a computer that’s twice as fast as the competition’s, but which sells for half the price. What happens when they find out what you really are.” Subtlety isn’t this show’s strong suit. When Joe refuses, his old colleague threatens, “let’s Let’s see Apparently IBM’s human resources reps aren’t sticklers, though, because the company offers him his job back. In a strange encounter he has with a former IBM colleague, we learn that Joe caused $2 million of damage to the company’s servers when he left theįirm. Just a salesman, as Cameron dismissively labels him? Or is he motivated by something other than money or the chance to get back at his former employer?Įvery answer we get in this episode only spawns more questions. Joe is no technical genius, and until the last few moments of the episode, there isn’t much evidence that he even cares about the technical capabilities of the device he’s building. Why is he so bent on copying IBM’s machine? Unlike Gordon and Cameron, These were scenes from a rote procedural if it feels like you’ve seen these characters before, it’s because you have.īut there’s an added layer here, a dollop of mystery that keeps the show from sinking into cliché. ![]() And Joe offersĪ hypey pitch for the company’s workers that concludes with a Steve Jobs-like ian plea to “put a ding in the universe.” A whiteboard capturing the insane scribblings of a mathematical breakthrough becomes a major turning point in the plot. Pizza and plays noisy punk as she tries to puzzle out a programming dilemma. ‘Halt and Catch Fire’ Recap: Love, Competition and GloryĪs Joe, Gordon and Cameron embark on their plan to build a clone of the IBM PC, they check off every box on the checklist Hollywood must keep for filming dramatic re-enactments of technical innovation.‘Halt and Catch Fire’ Recap: A Showdown at Comdex.‘Halt and Catch Fire’ Recap: In a Flawed Series, a Very Big Truth.The AMC series about the battle for tech dominance. ![]()
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