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Comment by illwrks | Hacker News Reader

There's a great TV show called "Halt And Catch Fire" that parallels the development of the tech industry, including what I think may be a nod to CompuServe mentioned in the article. It's only four seasons, it has some fantastic characters, excellent writing and is thoroughly enjoyable. It's fresh in my mind as I've only just rewatched it!

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543312/

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I fully second that, this is a must-see for any geek, much more so than e.g. War Games.

"Halt and Catch Fire" (HCF) often is jargon that refers to documented or undocumented opcodes or code sequences that leads the CPU to crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halt_and_Catch_Fire_(computing...

With a hat tip to all Commodore C64/MOS650 enthusiasts, I shall end this post with my favourite HCF sequence: 4C 10 7E.

_Happy watching!_

I recall BeOS had is_computer_on_fire()

double is_computer_on_fire();

Returns the temperature of the motherboard if the computer is currently on fire. Smoldering doesn't count. If the computer isn't on fire, the function returns some other value.

( https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/bebook/TheKernelKit_Sys...)

int32 is_computer_on()

If the computer isn't on, the value returned by this function is undefined.

not 'crash', which for computers refers to a temporary halt to operations which can be resumed by rebooting. an hcf is more like a car crash: something that physically damages the processor. like, if you have a microcontroller with four pins wired together to give you more drive current, if you drive two of them low and two high, you are likely to have an hcf

one thing we did on the C64 in this vein (I was a bad kid) was to send opcodes to the CPU on the 1541 floppy drive to send the head to a nonexistent track. This would sometimes jam the head and require physical repair of the drive.

haha rawk

I'd say "Mutiny" is a nod to Habitat, too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game)

Kinda. It's sort of a mix of Habitat and PlayNET/QuantumLink... more the latter than the former.

Totally forgot about QuantumLink but I agree completely. The whole being tied to/hamstrung by the C64 platform fits.

I've seen it and it's good. Thanks for reminding me, I'll watch it again.

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