Are the series technical or rather vague in that regard? If they are, how accurate are they?
Personally I think it's better than Mad Men.
This is a great description.
>silicon valley nascent tech startup era
Even better is that they start in Texas, and going to the up-and-coming Silicon Valley is one of the story lines.
Which at the time was referred to as the "Silicon Prairie". I still remember my Dad working for Control Data and he travelled frequently back and forth between Minnesota and Texas. I also remember a lot of conversations my parents had first about moving to Texas and then later moving out to CA when SV really took off.
We never moved, but during those years when tech really took off, he was constantly being recruited by companies in the valley.
Some examples (very low spoilers but you've been warned):
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1. In one of the first episodes, a couple characters design up a circuit to step through the values of an EEPROM to read off the value of each address. They use a series of 8 LEDs and convert the binary value to decimal in their head and then write it down on paper. Even if you were going to do something very manual like that you would want to use a 7-segment LED and driver so you could at least just write down the hex value.
2. One of the characters writes some firmware in assembler, and other characters keep saying that their code is "beautiful" and "art".
3. Later on in the series, some of the characters run an online game company and run a distributed game server on networked IBM XTs. They don't actually say if they're using some custom OS or how the accomplished that, but that also isn't the point of those episodes either.
4. There are brief flashes of assembler, basic, and C on a computer screen and most of it seems to be at least slightly incorrect.
All of that being said, I would give it a B+ for technical accuracy - and an A for being an awesome show.
Sure, fake Google comes a little early in the timeline, and Mutiny doesn't exactly map to anything that's familiar to me, but it all feels like it could have happened. Verisimilitude is really what matters here, and they pull it all off to an absolute T.
On the technical aspects, I loved when Donna got to do her thing those couple of times and do data recovery on disks. I wish they had been able to give her a bigger role in the early part of the series, because her character really shines when allowed to.
And, we have to mention the set design. It's perfect, right down to the little touches, like Donna and Gordon's J.C. Penney TV, or the Yars' Revenge poster hanging up in the Mutiny frat house. Sometimes I literally watch the show just to look at the sets.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22842547
As far as getting the window-dressing and feel of the time right, there's also Netflix's Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.
Real-time chat? Compuserve's CB Simulator. Craigslist? Compuserve certainly had classified ads as I'm sure did most of the others, including BIX. Usenet/Bullet Boards for interest groups? Compuserve Interest Groups, and every other service had that as well. Online gaming was also available on most of the networks, but special shout-out to Air Warrior that ran on GEnie.
You could also purchase airline reservations via SABRE which was supported by Compuserve and GEnie, get news, stock quotes, etc.
And yes, most of those services started out buying timeshare cycles from the likes of oil, insurance, and banking companies during evenings and weekends.
They didn't exaggerate much there - it was a space with plenty of competition, to the point that for a lot of people the Internet seemed like a boring step down in capabilities for some time, with networks like AOL and Prodigy believing they could stem the tide and keep people walled in.
For my part, before I got internet access, I reinvented a bunch of that stuff myself, and worked on a graphical BBS client and capability for federation. And there's nothing unique in that - I know many others who also did, unaware of what existed, and without thinking we invented anything new, because they were small, incremental obvious steps from what we did know about.
It's simply a natural set of things that people wanted, and the limiting factor was not the ideas, but access to time, talent and capital and a willingness to go ahead and do it.
That's often how these things work. Things get independently reinvented all over the place. Not necessarily well, or fast enough etc.
And you'll note Cameron is not the only one to invent any of the things she does in the series either.
Yes, it was basically re-inventing IP for no good reason because lack of internet access meant lack of info about what already existed...
When I, a few years later, got an internet connection and started reading the relevant ISPs, it was pretty annoying to see what had already existed.
If so, that's an interesting idea, but it kind of sounds like a good way for your users to run your phone bill up rather than theirs, while possibly not even engaging with your BBS at all. (For those who aren't familiar, back in the BBS days, you had to actually pay for "long distance" phone calls. And, "long distance" often wasn't very far away.)
Do I have it right, or was it something different?
In terms of cost, it was normal at the time to charge per minute fees for services on the big online services, so enabling remote services multiplexed over a network like that would be an opportunity for BBS operators to federate into a bigger network and gain revenue by charging for services, and start out without having the traffic to justify a fixed line.
But obviously, just like the big online services, that model became unviable the moment the internet went mainstream.
There are basically only two ways to construct a TV series that has any continuity to it whatsoever. You can either keep most of the main characters together for the entire series, and watch them grow and change, like most series do; or, you can do like American Horror Story does and just scrap everything and start anew every season or so. Some series don't care about continuity, like Seinfeld, so they fall outside the scope of this statement, but, the majority of TV series will be one or the other of these.
And, there's nothing really wrong with this construction, either. Like I said, it's just something you have to accept, kind of like how every TV home or apartment is absolutely massive compared to what real people live in, or how people are able to comfortably fly on airplanes without squishing themselves into the seats or their heads being within inches or less of the roof of the cabin. Or the fact that if anybody coughs on TV, they're usually deathly ill.
I'll have to check out Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, though. I've been putting off watching it for some reason -- maybe because for most of 2020, I felt like I was living in a Black Mirror episode.
Speaking of Netflix series that really get the time period correct, Stranger Things is 100% exactly like what it was like to be a kid in the 80s. Starting from the bowl haircut on Will, right on down to every last detail of the mall from season 3, and battling the Demogorgon in a friend's basement. Absolute 10/10 set design, and I never noticed a single anachronism.